Hippocrates' Woman : Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece

ISBN-13: 9780415138956 / Angielski / Miękka / 1998 / 344 str.

Helen King

Opis

In ancient Greece, gynaecology originated in the myth of the first woman Pandora, whose beautiful appearance was seen to cover her dangerous insides. This book demonstrates how ancient Greek healers read the signs offered by their patients' bodies, arguing that medicine was based on ideas about women and their bodies found in myth and ritual. Helen King deploys a wide range of comparative materials from the social sciences to discuss religious healing, chronic pain and the creation of a powerful self-image by aspiring healers. She outlines how nursing and midwifery have tried to create their own versions of the ancient Greek past to give themselves great status, and presents a detailed account of how doctors twisted ancient Greek texts into ways of controlling women's behaviour. Finally she analyzes how later medicine, by diagnosing hysteria and by recommending practices such as clitoridectomy, gave its decisions authority by claiming ancient Greek origins which never existed.

Recenzje

'King's eye for detail turns an intellectual feast into scintillating entertainment.' - Times Literary Supplement

'This is a fine contribution which is interesting whether approached from a localised interest in the history of science or from a broader concern with gender and social change.' - London Review of Books

'King provides a scholarly elucidation of the central importance of social and cultural factors in shaping medical practice and, conversely of medical practice in shaping the very definition - and experience - of what it is to be human.' - Sibyl

'It will nevertheless appeal to...medical historians and in particular to those wiith an interest in Women's Studies.' - C F Salazar, University of Cambridge

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 Constructing the Body; Chapter 2 Deceitful Bodies, Speaking Bodies; Chapter 3 The Daughter of Leonidas; Chapter 4 Blood and the Goddesses; Chapter 5 Asklepios and Women’s Healing; Chapter 6 What Does Medicine Mean?; Chapter 7 Reading the Past Through the Present; Chapter 8 Gender and the Healing Role; Chapter 9 Imaginary Midwives; Chapter 10 Green Sickness; Chapter 11 Once Upon a Text; concl Conclusion;

O autorze

Helen King is a Wellcome Trust Research fellow and Lecturer in the Departments of Classics and History at the University of Reading. Her wide range of publications on women and medicine includes Hysteria Beyond Freud (1993).