I’ve always hated Autumn. Sure, it’s objectively the most scrapbookable season of Massachusetts, but something about it is so essentially painful for me. Not the departure from the summer’s promise of warm memories, not the reminder of decay and descent in the leaves, not the intolerable tricker-treaters that break silence in my neighborhood every October’s end. Rather, I resent Fall for being transitional, a liminal space. Today, like Autumn, I will leave a characterization of my work that has defined me for the past four weeks: ancient medicine. In doing so, I will open my research to the divine, the religious, the hyper-medical (if you will), something that has been on the back burner in all the words I’ve read and written over the past month. And while I have been collecting data and gathering understanding on Mary’s context, both medically and culturally, there is something so terrifying in departing the safety, objectivity, and criticizability Hippocratic treatises and Aristotelian philosophy. How can I enter into the life of this woman and tell her the reality of her rhetorical existence? How could I possibly be ready to confront the monument that is this mother? It’s that autumnal doubt. But as summer’s crops become winter’s sustenance, we must enter this next season of work in ​full confidence of our preparations.
​Un-timidly, let me introduce you to the second mother to many: The Virgin Mary.

If Game Show Network were to exist over two millennia ago, “The Purity Test” would surely be of the most viewed features among their male audience. Physicians, clergymen, and your average, ancient Mediterranean Joe were simply obsessed with confirming the virginity, and therefore physical purity of a female body at nuptial question. Various cultural practices and medical surveys were performed on these untrustworthy and ambiguous females in order to soothe the masculine anxiety over imperfection reproduction, uncertain genealogy, and ‘uncontrollable’ feminine sexuality. The following entries highlight some of the fan-favorite methods of testing purity, I hope you enjoy the program:

1) Pregnancy. Easy, if a woman’s womb is swollen, she clearly must be with child, and therefore she must have engaged in sexual intercourse. The Old Testament connote great shame with pregnant women that are not yet betrothed, and urges men who have sexual intercourse with virgins to marry them immediately, the unmarried mother was an unacceptable image in Ancient Mediterranean eyes: “If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.” (Deut. 22:28-9)
2) Bloodied Sheets: As briefly discussed in Parthenogenesis – Creating Virginity, the Old Testament featured the nuptial sheets as one of the major articles of evidence for virginity. As women were expected to enter marriages as virgins, it would therefore be expected that the sheets upon which the nuptial consummation occurred would be quite saturated in blood from the breaking of the virginal flesh that sealed the womb. In fact, the bloodied sheets would regularly be presented to the parents of the bride as a means of affirming the legitimacy of the woman that the father presented to the husband. The Old Testament details how the father can use the bloodied sheets as a means of exposing a lying husband that is slandering a wife of which he is no longer fond (Deut. 22:13-20) While this logic does fit within its contextual physes of the sealed womb, it does pose a few problems as a questionable method of testing a bride’s virginity, as it is post-nuptial and, as contemporary science indicates, there would be no guaranteed bloodshed from the virginal bride. Ancient Jewish midrashim detail the bloodied sheets being brought before a court of elders with testifying witnesses in order to determine the purity or fidelity of a bride in her virginity trial.
3) Vaginal Examination: Even modern day gynecologists would leave a vaginal examination without full certainty of the sexual status of a woman, with “hymen integrity” being so subjective and variant depending on the patient. With this, it is not surprising that the first vaginal examinations performed by male physicians would not be without their faults. Ancient gynecologists would perform both pre- and post-coital examinations of the bride to test her virginity, specifically seeking the degree of rupture of the female genitalia. A healthy, intact looking vagina would pass the test, whereas vagina that appeared to have undergone physical trauma would be deemed impure. Clearly, upon post-coital examination of the vagina it would be impossible to determine the premarital purity of the bride at hand, nonetheless the practice persisted.
4) Ordeal Test: Described by Herodotus in his historical accounts of ancient Greece, an annual ordeal test was performed on the young female population of a town in Libya. In such a festival, the unmarried women would be divided into two groups that would proceed to attack each other. The women that remained alive and relative unscathed from the festive attack would be considered “true” virgins, as pristine physicality was associated with virginity and rupture and defilement was associated with promiscuity and “false” virginity. Moreover, Michael Rosenberg notes the religious element of this ritual, in that “virginity is read not through a woman’s anatomy, but rather through divine providence.” (Signs of Virginity, p 25)
5) Snakes and Cakes: Another popular purity test of the ancient Mediterranean culture involved virgins, snakes, and cakes. The questionable virgins would be blindfolded and led into a cave with cakes. The blinded women would present the cakes to the snakes of the cave, and if the snakes accepted the cakes, they would be deemed “true” virgins, whereas a rejected caked would point out the “false” virgins.
6) Virginity by Faith: Rosenberg highlights that among the medical and cultural ways through which men of Mediterranean Antiquity confirmed the purity of the bride at question, there was one newly emerging method that was to be revered above the others: divine oracle. In Matthew’s Gospel of the New Testament, Joseph is seen as a “righteous man,” for trusting in his holy vision of Mary’s valid virginity and refusing to expose her unmarried motherhood to the town. The Matthean infancy narrative itself includes emphatic repetition of Mary’s impregnation by the Holy Spirit and therefore connection to the divine. This implies that perhaps the most valid of virginity tests will not be in a medical examination or a cake challenge, but rather in an observation of the women’s pure demeanor and faith.

Ranging in levels of scientific validity and sheer ridiculousness, ancient Mediterranean virginity tests point to the severe distrust that men felt toward a woman’s understanding of her own body. Such practices and cultural mythologies, for example Pandora and Tamar who both masquerade as virgins, outline a fragility in the masculine conception of women. In medicine of Mediterranean Antiquity, the masculine body was conceived to be perfect, clean, and relatively undefiable, whereas “women [were] pollutable, polluted, and polluting” (Carson, Before Sexuality p 158). This, therefore, puts women in somewhat of an existential game of monkey in the middle, as they wrestle between expectations of purity and impurity. Perhaps the emerging hand of New Testament God will craft the solution to this feminine confusion: the Virgin Mother, Mary of Nazareth.

In order to rationalize the “natural order” that allowed the female body to conserve its pure, virginal state until nuptial consumption, ancient culture and medicine constructed the idea of a sealed womb. In the process of nuptial consummation, the woman’s vaginal canal was thought to widen, which was evidenced by the deepening of the girl’s voice, as her throat was thought to symmetrically widen upon her first sexual experience. Similarly, Soranos details the violent breaking of internal vaginal folds and their supporting uterine vessels upon a woman’s first sexual experience, which permanently changes the female body to be more open. Echoes of this “sealed womb” notion can be seen in the contemporary understanding of the “hymen,” or the internal vaginal membrane that partially or fully covers a virgin’s uterus; wedding veils can also be thought as symbolic projections of the hymen, which protects the bride from external dangers in her vulnerable passage between her father’s and husband’s care. As with today’s cultural obsession with “popping her cherry,” Soranos and even writers of Deuteronomy believed that heavy blood flow was to be expected with a virgin’s first experience with sexual intercourse, as the aggressive phallic force of the penis destroyed the protective tissue around or on top of the womb. This actually led to an ancient Jewish and early Christian tradition of checking the nuptial sheets after consummation, with large blood stains validating the virginity of the bride and therefore the legitimacy of the marriage. Hesiod’s myth, in which Pandora opens her own metaphoric womb-jar without phallic help, serves as a cultural cautionary tale against women that elect to change their own anatomy, as they will create evil and disorder in the world.

​The social construction of virginity, while at the center of primary cultural rituals, is surely problematic for many of its followers. Firstly, in connecting nuptials to sex, our cultures define the main objective of marriage to be defloration and eventual procreation; using language, such as “gametes,” only further associates conception with marriage, as if to invalidate any nuptial union that cannot create or does not desire children. Continuing, the sacrificial nature of wedding rituals objectifies women by reducing them to lamb-like entities that shuffle between the masculine protection of their father and their husband. Similarly, wedding attire equates purity to beauty, as if to associate shame and dirtiness with female promiscuity. As Rosenberg states, while much of the cultural and medical constructions of virginity tell young women how to understand their body, these constructions more importantly inform men how best to perform their masculinity. To be a “correct man” who followed the medical and cultural ideas of Mediterranean Antiquity was to be so sexually aggressive that you would make your newlywed wife violently bleed upon her first sexual experience.

Sex does not have to be marital, nor does it have to be painful. What sexpectations made by writers and physicians over two millennia ago do you still hold on to in your body image, marriage plans, or biology textbooks?

I was sitting in my high school biology class, during the lecture on bees. The slide that detailed their reproductive systems outlined two distinct paths of procreation: 1) the fertilized egg, produced out of two gametes, 2) the unfertilized egg, produced out of parthenogenesis. What was that, Dr. Ryan? gamete, derived from the ancient Greek word for “wife” or “husband” (think polygamous). Parthenogenesis, derived from the ancient Greek word parthenos or “virgin.” How can these social constructs that relate sex to marital status remain in today’s biology textbooks? Do we really think the queen bee wants or is deserving of all the problematic social baggage that comes with the title of ‘parthenos?’ Let us attack this issue head on… or more appropriately – maidenhead on.

Ancient Greek culture (and not-so-shockingly, into contemporary Western culture) uses marriage as ritual symbolizing the physical union of two individuals. As with most rituals, the actions performed in the ritual are often metaphoric of the internal (physical and emotional) changes that we undergo in the process of developing and moving through life. The study of Ancient Greek wedding rituals can, therefore, be incredibly indicative of the cultural perceptions of the female body, as she changes from parthenos to gyne or ‘unmarried woman’/’virgin’ to ‘married woman.’ Seeing as most girls of Mediterranean Antiquity were expected to be wed between the ages of 14-16 years old and ritual itself culminated to the nuptial consummation, the wedding rituals symbolized such a transitional period of girl to woman. Reflecting on content from Little Lamb, who made thee?, the marriage ritual from this period (and up to today) is strikingly similar in imagery and cultural perception to a sacrifice, thereby expressing then sacrificial killing of the bride’s girlhood. This is further conveyed in the ancient ritual practice, in which the betrothed girl would perform a ritual sacrifice of her childhood toys and garments on an altar the day before her wedding. The customary attire of the bride was also expressive of the symbolism of the marriage ritual: a veil and a girdle was to be worn. Respectively, the veil acted to protect the vulnerable female, as she walked the dangerous liminal space between girlhood and womanhood, and the girdle (called a “zone”) symbolically held the eruptive, feminine sexual energy that she had been preserving for her husband. The husband’s removal of the “zone” was culturally associated with the ritual of consummation, which occurred upon the marriage night. Casey M. Reynolds, in “The Nuptial Ceremony of Ancient Greece and the Articulation of Male Control Through Ritual,” points out that without postnuptial education, citizenship, or societal power, gynes remained children in the emotional and sociological sense. Perhaps the supposed transition to womanhood was, thus, conceived in the physical changes that came with nuptial consummation.

Michael Rosenberg’s Signs of Virginity excellently outlines medical and cultural conceptions of virginity from Mediterranean Antiquity, which will be helpful in navigating this liminal space between parthenos and gyne. Throughout the introductory chapter “Defining Virginity, Making Men,” Rosenberg details that this cultural compartmentalization of virgin vs nonvirgin was most likely generated out of the male fear of infertility or impurity in the female body they selected to bear their progeny. Moreover, a virgin came with the promise of undefiled, pristine reproductive organs, and near full certainty that the child was a product of his sperm only. With this, a cultural importance of virginity emerged, and the medical constructions of the virginal body followed suit.

In the tradition of the past few posts, The Wandering Womb and Barking and Broken Bitches, it seems only customary to discuss the next animal which served as a primary analogy for the female body in Mediterranean Antiquity: the lamb. Galen, a male pioneer of OB/GYN in 2nd Century Rome, was the first to relate the uterine lining ​​to an amnion – a cup that was used to collect the blood of sacrificial animals. This takes direct influence from previous Hippocratic imagery that compares menstrual flow to the flowing of blood from a sacrificial animal. Moreover, Galen develops Hippocratic constructions of the female body, by constructing the amniotic sac to be a cup that collects the sacrificial blood of the female body; perhaps this blood was considered sacrificial because the female body suffered in the process of generating new life, and thereby Hippocratic physicians and Galen were seeking to construct a deeper meaning to menstruation. In this interesting instance of Mediterranean Antiquity that relates human biology to religious ritual, the female body, on one hand, becomes empowered with significance and somewhat revered for its martyr-like suffering for the greater benefit of a growing community and new life.

This is surely a revolutionary view of the female reproductive system as being anything but violent, repulsive, and shameful. However, on the other hand, this construction of the female body delivers a similar feebleness and “repress-ability” of femininity that previous gynecological treatises incessantly construct. Male physicians, such as Galen and Hippocrates, use this sacrificial imagery to equate women to animals, such as lamb, that lack the mental agency to lucidly consent to valiant efforts such as a sacrificial ritual. Just as male leaders of religious traditions believed that they could take advantage of the lives of feeble minded animals as a means of “honoring” their gods, Galen urged Mediterranean men of Antiquity to take advantage of the female body. Continuing, as the bodies of sacrificial lambs were considered only significant to the religious ritual, Galen’s detailing of the uterine lining implies that bearing children is the sole purpose of the female body and that a woman is not able to achieve anything greater than or outside giving her entire self to the production of new life. Similarly, Galen’s constructions of the “amniotic sac” implies that male physicians of the time viewed the process of gestation as a metaphoric slaying of the mother. The question we must ask out of this, then, is who is sacrificing the mother? Is it men through the aggressive act of penetration? Is it God through the painful biology of menstruation? Is the woman’s wandering womb, which violently attacks its feminine host? or could it possibly be the female body revolting against itself, in its own monthly realization of its own “innate” inferiority? However this question is answered, femininity and the female body are depicted as lesser than and something of which to be ashamed.

This medical construction in itself functions as somewhat of a sexual assault on women, as they are unconsentingly giving their bodies over to the control of others. It is quite absurd, in my opinion, that contemporary gynecologists and obstetricians continue to use vocabulary that inherently constructs women as animalistic, lacking in agency, and controllable by men, such as “amnion” and “amniotic fluid.”

So to answer the age-old question that so wrongly has been posed at Jesus, instead of the entirety of womanhood: Little Lamb, who made thee? we can confidently answer that it was Galen and the male gynecologists of Mediterranean Antiquity that made women into the sacrificial animals that we continue to see them as today.

​Little Lamb, God bless thee.

The ancient Greek κῠ́ων​ (kuon), meaning “dog,” serves as a strong image in the cultural and medical depiction of women and their reproductive organs. Coming off of The Wandering Womb post, we have already investigated the animalistic construction of the uterus, which functioned to instill fear in women over their own bodies and create urgency in women to have sex with men. This post will continue that notion, by looking into the common analogy of women and dogs, as seen in various texts from ancient Greek culture and science.

Homer specifically, in his Odyssey, is quite generous with his use of analogies to dogs when he describes vicious women. For example, Homer uses the word κύντερον (kunteron), roughly translating to “more dog-like,” in two instances in the Odyssey: first, when describing a woman that viciously and shamelessly killed her husband; secondly, when describing a violently hungry stomach. According to Helen King, the word for stomach (gaster), used in Homer’s text was used to describe both the bowel and the womb, as Greek physicians hypothesized that digestion and gestation occurred in the same organ. Continuing, there are over ten instances in this text where Homer uses the phrase “shameless bitches” or “impudent bitches” to describe women that seem to obstruct, dominate, or hurt men of the epic. Similarly, Hesiod in his Worls and Days and Theogony adopts a similar practice of comparing Pandora and her womb (gaster) to dogs, as she is said to have been divinely created with ‘a bitch mind,’ and ‘ravenous inside.’

Throughout gynecological texts from Greek Antiquity, there continues to be a strong relationship between women, wombs, and dogs. Aristotle, in his earlier treatises, compares a sexually aroused woman to a sexually aroused female dog, in that her breasts will swell. This suggested comparison links femininity to the insatiable sexual appetite and dissolute insolence with which Aristotle describes undomesticated dogs. Obstetric vocabulary of Greek Antiquity itself seems to draw the link between the kuon (dog) and kuein (the quality of being swollen or pregnant).

Cultural and medical connections between wild dogs and women serves to further depict women as uncontrollable, violent beings that require domestication from men. From this, not only is the physical anatomy of women being animalistically portrayed, as discussed in The Wandering Womb, but the symbolic entity that is femininity becomes reduced to a recklessly sexual, wild animal. Perhaps, therefore, the wandering womb can be projected to the ancient Greek male perception of femininity itself, being something that is fleeting and uncontrollably moving away from where it “should” be. Just as intercourse was thought to anchor the womb, perhaps impregnation was an ancient man’s way of controlling and constricting woman from achieving things that their wives would have, had they not been so suppressed by their social and medical constructions.

With echoes in contemporary gender roles, this fragile and insecure male perspective of femininity influenced much of development gynecology, specifically the physes in Hippocratic treatises. The treatises outline the idea that a woman who has given birth suffers from considerably less menstrual pain than a virgin, as the vaginal flesh has been stretched and broken. Just as the penetrating man destroys the strength of the girls vaginal flesh, he is symbolically destroying her “natural” feminine tenancies for overt sexuality and fleeing mobility. Conclusively, to be a fully-realized, socially correct woman of Greek Antiquity was to be a broken bitch.

Of all the medical constructions of the female body, the wandering womb stands out as one of the most distant from the contemporary understanding of female anatomy. With this, it should be analyzed significantly, as it is through these historical cracks of comprehension that shines the truest cultural perspectives from the time.

The hodos ​was what Hippocratic physicians identified as the full body channel that spanned the nostrils to the vagina, as a unique part of the female body. Hippocratic treatises detail the lack of ligaments or tendons tethering the womb down, so we can think of the hodos as a path upon which the womb could move or “wander” throughout the body. The womb, unlike the rest of the female flesh was considered dry, and therefore could be considered an entirely separate entity from the wet body that houses it. Plato, a relative contemporary of Hippocratic practitioners, details this in his Timaeus, where he describes the womb as “like an animal living inside an animal.” The remains of this animalistic characterization of the female reproductive organs can be seen in contemporary use of anatomical vocabulary, such as labia (lips) and cervix (neck), that construct the female body to have a second set of anatomical features. Hippocratic philosophy develops these ideas by saying that the womb wanders around the loose female flesh in search of moisture from especially wet organs, such as the heart or the liver. Hippocratic treatises even assign discrete sensitivity to the womb, detailing a cure for a wandering womb should be through placing pleasant smelling perfumes near a woman’s cervix and foul smells near the nostrils. Hippocratic physicians explained that a womb that drifted too far from its pelvic home can endanger the female body, as it will remove vital fluids from the important organs and will not have access to its the vagina, which was the primary and preferred orifice of menstruation. In such a case, blood would build up in the womb, thereby causing abnormal amounts of blood to collect in the chest, which was thought to lead to agitation, epilepsy, and eventually suicidal behavior. The word “hysterical” comes from this exact physis of the female body, as the Greek word for uterus is “hystera,” and according to Hippocratic treatises “the womb is the origin of all diseases in women.”

The doctors of the time aptly provide a solution for women suffering from wandering wombs and hysteria: sexual intercourse. Ejaculation into the womb was thought to be a means of moistening the womb, which would weigh it down and prevent it from further drifting in the body. From this, it can be deduced that to be a woman in ancient Greece meant that penetration from a man was a requirement for your health and continued life. Hippocratic treatises and practices told women that they were objects that needed men not only to cure them, but to protect them from the vicious animal that lived within them.