Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Ancient Greek Sexual Health: Wandering Wombs & Headless Beetles

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

If there’s one thing you’ll find out from this episode, it’s that the Ancient Greeks were better at philosophy than gynaecology.Struggling to conceive? You might be given a stuffed dead puppy to provoke fertility.Helping Kate make sense of Ancient Greek gynaecology today is Helen King, author of Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece.What questions will a visit to an Ancient Greek doctor be like? How would you stop your womb from wandering? And how would your body temperature help define your gender?This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, how are you doing? It's been ages, hasn't it? All right, it's not been exactly ages, but I've missed you. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwix the sheets. But before we can keep going with this, you know what's coming? That's right.

It's the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. I feel safer, you feel safer, we all feel safer. On with the show. Well, hello, betwixters. I am just browsing through some ancient Greek medical texts, or scrolls, as one does. That's just how we like to roll here on betwixt.

And you know what, it is fascinating. I have learned so much about my own body. I simply had no idea. Let us flick to a random page to see what we can find out. Hmm, it does seem to be that, Anything that could possibly go wrong with a woman is about her womb. Frozen shoulder, that's your womb. Ingrowing toenail, that's your womb.

Particularly itchy rash. Woom, womb, womb. And this is because of an ancient medical belief in the wandering womb. That's right. Greek doctors actually believed that the womb could upsticks and just wander around the body, blocking up other organs, messing stuff up, throwing things out of whack, and just generally causing chaos. the tricky things, wombs.

And it wasn't just the medical authorities who believe this. Plato thought it too. He seems to have been better at philosophy than gynecology. I think perhaps you should just stay in his lane. But he had a go with it as well. So here's a question. If your womb is wandering around your body causing mayhem, how would you get it back to where it should be?

Well, one solution was to squat over something that smelled terrible. The idea being that it would frighten the womb back to where it should be. hashtag science don't worry betwixtas you are in safe hands here but I wanted to let you know about wandering womb so this is basically a public service announcement on sexuality in ancient Greece

and if you think your womb might be on the move well you'd be a fool not to keep listening what do you look for a man oh money of course you're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the fun Oh, dear.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Oh, and welcome back to Petwigs the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. The ancient Greeks were a very, very clever bunch of people. Well, some of them were.

They were apparently the best thinkers in human history, but they didn't get anything right, not by a long shot, especially when it came to gynecology. But, I mean, 10 out of 10 for effort, guys. Today we are joined by the fantastic, the amazing Professor Helen King, who is the author of so many books on ancient Greek medicine and gynecology. I couldn't even list them here. What this woman doesn't know about ancient Greek fannies is not worth knowing.

But the book we're going to be talking about today is Hippocrates women, reading the female body in ancient Greece. We will be asking such questions as, how did cultural attitudes affect ancient Greek understanding of gynecology? Was there any concept of gender fluidity at the time? And what the hell was all this floating womb nonsense about? Wandering wombs at the ready, betwixters, I am ready to find out if you are. Hello, and welcome to betwixt the sheets.

It's only Professor Helen King. How are you doing? I'm doing fab, thank you very much, Kate, and it's lovely to be here. It is more than lovely to have you here. I am such a huge fan of your work. You have written so much amazing stuff, but it's your work on Greek ancient gynecology that I am absolutely fascinated by.

And do you know, I think the first place that I encountered your work was the essay that you wrote about Rachel Mainz's hypothesis. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The vibrator moment. Yes, I know. Yes. What I loved about that article is not only was it the precision of a scalpel just taking it apart,

but when you're reading an academic essay and you know that the author's pissed off. Like that was... Yeah, you read me correctly there. Before we even get to that, though, I suppose my question should be, how did you end up researching Greek and ancient gynecology in Mexico? How did you even end up doing this research? That is a great question, Kate. And it's a rather roundabout story.

So when I was an undergraduate, I came across the ancient Greek text on diseases of young girls, which is still my favourite, partly because it's really short. So you can get a grip on the Greek very quickly, which is pretty good. But it describes this bizarre condition where girls at puberty suddenly go basically

completely raving bonkers and start jumping down wells and saying foul things. as you just imagine going fuckety, fuckety fuck in ancient Greek. And this is all to do with their blood having got stuck at their diaphragm, which is sort of not exactly what we think of the diaphragm. It is in the middle, but it's sort of like the seat of consciousness. It's affecting their brains somehow, although it's in the middle of their bodies. It's like, you know, ancient Greek medicine is kind of freaky.

So that really intrigued me, and I really loved it, and I wanted to work more on it, but I didn't feel you could really put in a proposal for a PhD on ancient Greek menstruation. So I put in a proposal on ancient Greek concepts of time. And after a few weeks on this, I was accepted. And after a few weeks on this, people kept saying to me when they met me in the corridor, oh, what you're doing, clocks are you? And I'm like, no. Oh, what are you doing?

Water clocks? No, no. Like seasons? Well, not really. And it gradually occurred to me. I was actually doing ancient Greek menstruation. So it was time in relation to the female body and cycles and things. And I just thought it was marvelous that there is an ancient Greek menstruation.

ancient Greek text that talks about all that. That's almost like a Scooby-Doo sneak it in for a PhD, is that you pulled a mask off. It's, it's ancient Greek menstruation all the time. Yes. I'm so glad that you have, though, because it's such, it's a fascinating subject. I'm trying to get your head round, how they conceived of bodies, how they thought they worked. And it's so important because the Greeks, they were the, they're often called the fathers of modern medicine. The ancient Egyptians and some other people might have a few things to say about that, but there's no doubting how important their work was in Western medicine because it just kept being repeated, didn't it, again and again and again? Yeah, again and again. And particularly,

by the time you get to the 16th century, there's this sort of renaissance of ancient Greek ideas, Hippocratic ideas. I mean, I don't want to get into whether Hippocrates existed because he didn't, so let's just leave it there, shall we? But the texts associated with the name of Hippocrates. And they all suddenly made a comeback in the 16th century. And that was because there really wasn't much in existing Greek and Roman medicine that people knew about that was quite so narrowly gynecological. So if you wanted to know things like what remedy to give for this condition or what to do if your periods were too heavy or too light or if you thought your blood had got stuck

up the top of your body and wasn't coming down, all these things which were perfectly possible in that model of the body, there wasn't anything else really to use. So to find the Hippocratic texts and translate them from Greek into Latin in the 16th century was a big thing, because that brought it into mainstream medicine where all European learned doctors read Latin. So once you've got it in Latin, you can read it. And then it's just a wow moment, like, gosh, there is all this material. It's the sort of excitement I had as a student, but multiplied big time. And the medieval Islamic physicians also translated the Greeks.

So it turns up there as well. So what these people were coming up with has had a profound impact. Yeah, exactly. It's not just Western medicine. It's in the Islamic tradition too. Some of the texts that are around translated into Arabic were not translated into Latin, for example. So things survive across a lot of different cultures. There's a lot of Syriac texts, for example, that don't exist anymore in the original Greek. But we've got the translation. So we can sort of guess what the Greek might have said. It's a very big tradition, a multi-national tradition. So let's talk about some of the things, big ideas in Greek medicine. One of the most interesting ones, one of the ones that has survived to this day,

in the same way that Helen Mainz was really interested in it and it becomes a bit of an internet thing, the wandering womb theory. Let's have a talk about that. What, did they really think that the womb just upped its moorings and wandered around the body? What was that? Yeah, they believed it could influence the whole body. And so from that, it's not such a huge step to say, well, it must actually physically move and put pressure on things. So they believed in a woman, if you had a dodgy pain in your shoulder, it means your womb's got up to your shoulder. If it's a man with a dodgy pain in the shoulder, it means you've been overdoing it in the garden or something. It was no wandering penis. Yes, quite. Don't go there. But it's that level where everything in a woman's body somehow goes back to the fact that she's got excess blood.

and it has to come out every month. If it doesn't, it will stay in there, it will rot. Obviously, knows no hormone theory. There's no idea you need to tell the womb lining to shed. It's assumed that because you eat and drink, you're building up blood all the month, and then you have to get rid of it every month. And as I say, if you don't, it'll get stuck. So any pain could be due to a menstrual period getting stuck somewhere. So your first question that a Greek doctor would ask you, an ancient Greek doctor would ask you, is, have you had your period? And we all know, periods can be a bit all over the place. So if you say no, well, it means you've got blood stuck somewhere. And then you've got a whole delightful raft of therapists to try and get the blood out again. Do you want to give us a

few of the highlights? If I was a poor Greek woman who'd just got to the doctor with an ingrowing toenail and they'd said, well, have you had your period? Well, the critical one, for me, is always the beetle pestries. It has to be the beetle pestries. So these are khantharid beetles, as in Spanish fly. So well known in the history of sexual. So they make you really itchy and uncomfortable. So you take your beetles, you wrap them up in wool, having first removed the head, that's nice, isn't it? And the wings, wrap them up in wool, and you insert them like a tampon. And this is supposed to go to irritate your wound, or sort of bring it back again. Of course, it will actually irritate your vaginal lining.

So there's a sporting chance you'll bleed just because of the therapy. But the bleeding would be interpreted as, oh, this is a menstrual period that got stuck. Oh, good, it's coming out. Another one that I've read about, and you can tell me if this is true, was they thought that the womb was attracted to smells. So to try and get it back into where it should be, they'd like waft smells at women. That's right. So there's this idea that the female body is sort of like a tube with a mouth at both ends. It's interesting how words like labia means lips, right? Servic's neck. It is still in the terminology, mouth at both ends. So what you do is if your womb has moved up, you get the woman to smell disgusting things. to sort of send it down again, and you have fragrant, perfumy things going on down the vaginal end. And if the womb has come out, it's prolapsed, you will get the woman to sniff nice things to sort of pull it up again. So, yeah, I'm afraid that one is true. Was there any kind of corresponding understanding of male bodies? Was there any comprehension that their organs moved around, or did they view it in an entirely different way?

Well, they certainly do move around, but not internally to the extent that the wound does. Plato was quite explicit, but wombs move and penises move, but it's this internal invisible movement that's the thing. You can't see where it's gone. You can only try and tell from the symptoms where it might have got to and therefore what sort of sniffy things you need to do or whether you need to put bandages around the woman to hold it back in place or all sorts, really. As puppy dog fumigations as well, do you want them? Do what? Yes, I do. We better go there. Yeah, you look like a woman who wanted to hear about puppy dog fumigations.

Okay, so this one is because dogs are obviously, they have litters. They have more than one kid at a time. So if you want a woman to be fertile, you want her to be more like a dog in that sort of positive sense. Dogs are often a bad image, bad image for women and for men. But you want her to be fertile like someone that has litters. So you take a puppy and you remove the intestines and you stuff it. it with fragrant substances. They do like their fragrant substances. Then you put it in a jar. You put the jar into a big hole in the earth, which you've left warmed up with coals, not actually fire, but just like warm coals. So the fumes from this jar and this deceased puppy and the perfumes will all gradually waft up their way, up the vagina into the womb, which will increase

their fertility. I suppose this all made perfect sense to them, as mad as it sounds, to us, this was cutting edge stuff as far as they were concerned. Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, if you have got something wrong with you and someone's doing something to make you better, that is quite a positive thing. Even if you don't much like what they're doing, at least it means you're being taken seriously. Yes, you have got a problem and we've got this way of treating you and this will work. It hopefully builds up your confidence to some level. And it is indeed, it's cutting edge. Of course, one of the big questions is we don't know how far these written texts by men were replicating what women were doing anyway in the privacy of their own homes,

or whether this is some male hideous thing which is being done to women. It doesn't sound like a lot of fun, does it? No, I just can't imagine going in the doctrine going home with a dead puppy in a jar and just being like, right, okay. Thanks. Yeah, we'll try this. We'll try the puppy. We've failed on the Beatles. We'll try the puppy. Let's talk about that article that you wrote about Rachel Mainz's book where she hypothesized that, I mean, she was focused largely on the 19th century, but it's from her book that this idea that doctors invented the vibrator to masturbate their women patients to hysterical proxim to cure hysteria. That was the hypothesis. But she made the claim that this went all the way back to the ancient world. Like it wasn't utterly delusional.

There are bits of it that you can kind of see what's happened there. And you're entire article is going, I see what you think, but no. What was she looking at and what were Greek doctors interfering with their patients? Well, there's certainly truth in the idea that getting pregnant is good for you in this, because it uses up all that excess blood that you're eating and drinking is producing all through the month in making a baby. So pregnancy is good. Giving birth is good because giving birth means that you expel any blood that's got stuck in the body and has been hanging around for months along with a baby. So, reproducing. productive stuff is healthy. But masturbation to orgasm, not. We're not saying there are no

orgasms in ancient Greek medicine. There's a wonderful text which talks about how women sort of produce this sensation and then there's some sort of calming down thing going on. And it all sounds very pleasant. But doctors making you have orgasm historically has been a very odd thing because orgasm's been seen as bad for you. It's sort of intense. You want to calm down and rest. You don't want to have all that excitement. And the idea that doctors would actually do this, bearing in mind that from the Hippocratic ancient Greek doctors onwards, there's been a lot of unease about having a doctor come to treat your daughter or your wife. What are they up to in there? You know, it's a bit iffy. Anything involving private parts and doctors is, so you really would not want a

situation where doctors are deliberately making have an orgasm. It's just doesn't work in terms of the patient-doctor relationship for a start. And as you said earlier, there is evidence that they were putting odd things inside the vagina, beetle, pesseries and kind of, but, you know, they were gynecologists, they're going to do that. But no, it wasn't about making anybody actually orgasm. No, and there's some interesting stuff there that is relevant about orgasm and conception, because there are different theories of how you get pregnant in the ancient world. So in some of them, it's just the man's seed imposes its shape on the woman's blood,

so women just provide raw material and men do all work in terms of making a baby. But in other theories, there are two seeds. Men and women both produce a seed, and you have to have both to make the baby. So on that basis, you do need orgasm to get pregnant. But that's not the same as saying that there is this sort of overall condition of something called hysteria, which is always treated throughout history by making women have orgasms. It isn't. I mean, even the word hysteria is not an ancient Greek word. It sounds like it is because Hustera is a word for the womb. But the actual word is never used in ancient medicine.

I've seen that written in Greek medical texts. Male seed, I totally get that. I know what that is. But when they're talking about women's seed, I was quite confused about what do they mean by that? Because for a while, I thought it was menstrual blood. But now I'm not so sure. What do they mean? when they're talking about female seed? Some theories it could be menstrual blood, the idea it's got some sort of power as well as just being raw material. But often it could just be referring to something like vaginal lubrication.

Just, oh gosh, the woman is wet, so this must be seed. You know, nothing that dramatic. Because, of course, they've got no idea of how it's actually happening. They don't have microscopes. You know, they can't see how a baby is made. And historically, it's really quite late in the day, as you all know, that people actually see sperm doing their thing with the egg. But certainly there's nothing eggy going on here at all.

Even if nobody's masturbating patients to orgasm, and hysteria is a modern word, but they did have a lot of concerns around what I've seen being referred to as uterine suffocation. I don't know what they called it. But what was that just like the womb holding its breath for a very long time? What was that? I love it. I love it. The womb holding its breath is great.

It's the womb getting up higher in the body and actually putting pressure on your diaphragm and your breathing organs to the point where you can't breathe. Oh, right. And because wombs are like ovens, you know, so much imagery here, wombs are like ovens, they're sort of hot. Women are thought to be colder than men, of course, because obviously hot is good, cold is bad, so women are cold.

But their wounds are actually hot, and they can sort of cook things inside. They can cook the blood and the seed to make the baby. Wombs are like an oven. There's the bun in the oven image that your womb is actually somehow helping the seeds. and the blood mix to sort of rise like a loaf in the oven. So all this heat things happening. And if all that hot stuff goes up the body and somehow gets stuck and starts pushing on the organs of breathing, you can't breathe. You're suffocated. That's the idea of uterine suffocation.

It's confusing because it's, in Greek it's hystericae, Pnix being suffocation. And hystericae, you think, oh, it's hysteria. It's not a thing called hysteria. It's a symptom of a wandering, womb. And it happens to have got your breathing organs and that's why you can't breathe. If you went somewhere else, you'd have different symptoms. There's lots of different places. Wounds can go. And this is when they'd start whipping out their beetle suppositories and puppy dogs. And if you were lucky, a nice olive oil to just rub on your belly. Yeah, yeah. I think you'd have to be very lucky to get that one, I think. Your work was the first place that I'd encountered this idea that In Greek medicine, the body was conceived.

So gender isn't, it's understood as binary, but it's not so much that there's a sexual difference as a heat difference. Yes. Which I really like. So that kind of opens up the possibility of, well, maybe there was some more fluidity around gender than we think because it's not that you're a man or a woman. There's this body, and if it's hot, it's more manly.

And if it's cool, it suddenly becomes quite girly. Yep. I think there's something in that. There are stories of sex change in the ancient world. on your wedding night seems to be a bad in a moment for women, you might suddenly become a bloke on your wedding night. It's like you suddenly, your body has changed maybe under the stress of an imminent wedding, I don't know, and suddenly things will pop out. Undescended testicles will suddenly appear. And oh my goodness me, you can't get married anymore because now you're a bloke.

These stories are all over the ancient world and they're told by non-medical writers too and they're told in terms of I myself have seen someone that this happened to. They're not told as myth, they're told as actual people have changed. But the thing is you can only change one way. You can only change towards the male, because men are perfect, right? And nature tends towards perfection. So you can only go from girl to boy on that basis. But yes, the idea that it's more about heat does suggest more of a sort of spectrum.

And some of the ancient Greek medical texts talk in terms of spectrum, that what your gender identity is depends on where in your mother's womb you were. So there's a theory that the womb has got seven different sections and they go from girly girls to really manly boys, if you're up that end. And if you're in the womb somewhere in between those, you can be a hermaphrodite in their terms. You can be someone who is of an uncertain gender because, yeah, just, there's. There's lots of stuff about the womb here. And there's also the idea that the left of the womb produces girls and the right of the womb produces boys. So when the man's seed falls in the womb can affect the gender and the gender identity of

the person that's born. And there's a particularly lovely passage which talks about how, sorry, my idea of lovely is a bit odd. I do appreciate that. But it talks about how it depends on left and right. And the man can try and influence the sex of the unborn child by tying up. one of his testicles. This could be challenging, I think. Listen, they don't have beetle pesseries, so they're fine.

Well, no, but this sounds almost as painful as beetle pesseries, I think. So you can tie up your left testicle and then only your right one will produce, so you're more like you to get boys. So if you've got man with left testicle tied up, right testicle producing seed, woman lies on her side with her right side down. So the seed goes into the right side. you've got right-sided seed in a right-sided wheel, but you might get a boy.

Well, that makes perfect sense. I'll be back with Helen after this short break. What I do like about the Greeks is they seem to have a lot of these rules around this stuff and some fairly interesting ideas about the mechanics of it. But pleasure was quite important to them. Like, that comes across. And I've always found that very interesting because I'm endlessly curious as to what happened And when we got to the 19th century and all the medieval period, even when suddenly pleasure's bad.

Because in the ancient Greek world, pleasure is, it's good, it's a good thing. Like, you know, as long as it's within marriage and we're making babies if you're a woman, etc. But pleasure's good. Yeah, pleasure's good. And that's why that you need the woman to orgasm too thing is so important. But actually her pleasure matters. Okay, it matters because of the end goal, which is conception. But at least it matters.

Did the ancient Greeks, like I'm always trying to track this one down, because by time you get to the medieval period, there's this view that women are far more highly sex than men, which is interesting because now we've kind of flipped the other way. But for the medieval people, women were just these massive, sexual, voracious, nymphomaniacs. How were the Greeks with this? Was that an idea that you see cropping up there? You do see it cropping up. There's this wonderful myth about the prophet Tyresius, blind prophet Tyresius, who knows. the truth. And at one point in his life, he sees a couple of snakes mating, I mean, like you do on a walk through the ancient Greek world, you know, and he kills one of them. And he changes sex as a result. So it's like he kills the female one and he becomes male or vice versa, anyway. So he's actually experienced, Tyresius has experienced being man and being woman. So there's another way of fluidity for you. And because he's experienced both, he flips around. At one point, Zeus and the Heera, the chief god and wife, are having a conversation about whether men or women enjoy sex more.

Love the insight into what gods talk about over a cup of coffee in the afternoon, in the evening or something. So, you know, is it? What do you think? And they say, well, we can't decide here, really. We'll bring in Tyresius because he knows, he's done it. He's done it as both. So he comes in and he announces that women enjoy it more. And that's when the goddess Heira is so cross, because that was a secret, she didn't want anyone to know she was actually enjoying it. So she She's really crossed with him, and that's when she strikes him blind. So it's really interesting that there was a conversation about this. Yeah.

And that it's between the gods, and it comes out that, you know, it's women, women enjoy it more. But then there's a question of they might enjoy it more, but is it more intense for a man? So how do you measure enjoyment? Is it length? You know, is it duration? Is it intensity? And they go with, yeah, okay, women, more duration, but men may be more intensity. Too much information, isn't it really?

The understanding of the body and gender difference is caused by heat, but it is still quite binary. How are same-sex relationships conceived of in the ancient world? Was it just like you've got a bit too much heat and they don't have enough heat? Because we like to think about the ancient Greeks sometimes, you know, it was this kind of like gay paradise. And it's always like, I wish I could tell you that it was, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Yeah, it is I'm afraid. It's always nice to find a gay paradise, but on this occasion, really not. So with the Greeks, it does seem to be that there's quite a fixed pattern where it's an older man with a younger boy just until his beard starts to grow. It's a very one-sided thing that's seen as

quite educational. It's sort of good for the young boy to have an old chap to look after him. That's lovely. It's quite romantic. The older chap will give gifts, you know, like a hair. not quite sure why. You often see a young man clutching a hair on a vase and an older man putting his arm around him. That's very lovely. Or he might give him a flask of olive oil. And he has to sort of woo the young boy. The young boy must say, no, no, no, no, definitely not. And then eventually go, well, yeah, okay, if you must, but just between the thighs, you know, nothing else. Right. Okay. It's very ritualized. And there are examples, a few examples of people where actually then haven't got this big age difference. They're more like, well, we would think of a couple,

and it's not something that you just stop when the boy grows a beard. But these are really, really, really rare, and they're considered odd. You're supposed to start off with your boy and encouraging him to become a nice young man and giving him presents and things. And then the boy will grow up and he will marry a woman. And then in turn, he will be the older man who's looking after a younger boy. So it's much more fluid between what we would see as different sexualities. But there was shame attached to being to a same-sex couple of the same age.

What kind of shame was it? Well, it's like, you're not a proper man, really. I don't trust you with anything. You're not a proper man. None of these categories really match that well. So, for example, things like being interested in personal grooming as a man. Yeah. You know, plucking your legs and making sure you smell lovely.

That is not seen as a gay thing to do at all. It's seen as a very heterosexual thing to attract more women. Yeah, yeah. It's not at all easy to match their hair. categories on to ours. And what about women having sex with other women? Do we have much record of them? Well, there's the famous poet, Sappho, of course, Sappho of Lesbos, as in lesbians, and her poems that survive in fragments are very passionate about women. And it's been suggested that she's like a sort of chorus mistress figure, that she has these young girls who sing

her poems for her and she gets connected emotionally and physically with them. We don't know. We just don't know. But it's that thing again, if we believe that the big thing about sex for ancient Greeks is penetration, then if there isn't any penetration, it's not very interesting. It's not really sex. Things about who penetrates whom, who's the dominant partner. And with both women, it's kind of irrelevant. It just tells us so much, doesn't it? Just like all these lesbians just absolutely flying under the radar. Just like, no, no, it's just jolly japes. It's just jolly japes. You know, we're just in the women's quarter of the house. You know, this is my friend. But there were erotic texts written in the ancient Greek world, weren't they? And there's a kind of

whole debate around what do they function as. Is it pornography? Is it humor? Is it what is it? But they do, they write about sex quite a lot. It seems quite a fun topic of conversation for them. Yeah, they write about sex. There's lots of. debates about is it better with women or with men for a bloke, you know, as in you can fall in love with a bloke better because blokes are more wonderful. You know, you can really appreciate a man's soul in a way you can't appreciate a woman's soul. Nice. So maybe love of men is better than love of women. There's those sorts of discussions. And then there's this extraordinary tradition of pornographic manuals or whatever you want to call them, sex manuals, how to do it, which exist.

And bizarrely, it was not till the 1970s that a fragility. It was not till the 1970s that a fragility. of one of these actually turned up in papyrus, as in, oh, look, this looks like the lost manual of Philinus, the dreadful sex writer from the ancient world. Phelinus, probably 3rd century BCE, Philinus, maybe. And we only knew about it from Christian writers who were saying, oh, these dreadful Greeks, they wrote disgusting books. Ooh, philinus, ooh, it's horrible, just disgusting, don't go there, filthy book. And felonis turns out the chapter that we seem to have in this papyrus is much more

sort of how to meet a nice girl. Oh. You know, it's not straight in there. It's the sort of, first of all, you need to find a girl and be nice to her. And then maybe, you know, maybe a bit of kissing. That's kind of sweet. It's very sweet. The lists of sexual positions, which is what the Christian writers imply, all this is about.

Maybe that was like chapter 10 or something. You've got to actually meet someone first, haven't you? Was Phelinas a real person, do you think? Good question. Don't know. It was for therliness a woman, was for that it's a man writing as a woman because, you know, writing in drag, it's one way of saying, I've got authority. I'm actually a woman, but maybe they weren't. So we don't know, but it's wonderful to think they actually had these books. And they sort of fit with the visual arts, too. So we read about little paintings of sexual positions that people like the Emperor Tiberius would have on his bedroom wall to give people ideas. And possibly they were connected to the books. You know, here's chapter 10, number one. And here's chapter 10, number one. And here's chapter 10, number too. Even if Valanius didn't exist, the fact that these texts are authored in a woman's name is still really important. That still tells us something about how women and sex were viewed in the ancient

world. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's very important. It's again, it's back to what you were saying about the idea that women were actually the ones who were sexually voracious, not men. So they're the ones who write these books. Another woman who is possibly a myth, slash almost certainly, but I wish she wasn't. I'm going to butcher my ancient Greek now. Agnodosi? Agnodic. Adnodic. Yeah. Adnodicke. Thank you. Tell me a bit about her because I was so rooting for her. And then I got to the end and I was just a note going, yeah, probably none of this happened. I was like, no. Terribly sorry. I know she's great, isn't she? So it's a story that turns up in the Roman Empire, but it's set much earlier, set sort of fourth century BCE. And it just turns up in one author,

hyginaus, and it's a really short version of it. It's like you summarising something that maybe one day we'll find on a papyrus, you never know. And so she's supposedly the first midwife or the first obstetrician or the first female doctor. It's not clear which. She wants to learn medicine. She can't because at that point only men can learn medicine. So she cuts off her hair wears male disguise and goes off to learn medicine. And then she comes back, she hears a woman crying out in labour, possibly, crying out in pain of some sort, goes in, the woman says, ooh, but you're a man, I'm not going to show you my bits. It's lady parts here. And Agnodicay says, but I am a woman, and lifts up her skirts. At which point the patient goes, oh yes, you are, aren't you? That would do it.

Okay, doctor, I'll talk to you. And she goes on doing this so successfully that the male doctors find that they're losing patients. No one wants to see them anymore. They're all going to Agnodicay. So then they decide that she must be, they assume she is a bloke. The drag is very successful. They assume she is a bloke. So they say, okay, you're clearly seducing your patients. That's how you're getting so many patients. You're having sex with them. What other reason could that be? Isn't it a great logical conclusion? You know, successful doctor must be having sex with the patients. So Agnodicay is brought to court and they say, you've been having sex with your patients. And she goes, no, I haven't. Lifts up her skirts, goes, da-da, again. Oh, no, you can't. You're a woman. Okay. So then they change the law. I mean, it's completely bizarre story. They changed the law so women of free birth and not slave women can learn medicine. Well, this is just completely bizarre because there's no evidence for such a law anywhere. There's evidence for anything. But it's a fantastic story. Were there women physicians, like actual ones that we know. Oh, they were. Tell me a bit about what the evidence for them is. There's gravestones where people are described as a doctor and they use the sort of female version of the male word for doctor. So it's just like they're exactly the same sort of. a doctor as a man is. We know that it's just a myth that women were always illiterate and never ever learned anything. Some women have always been educated, particularly if their parents are educated. If they've got a father who's a doctor, you might well teach your daughter some medicine so that then when you're going to see patients, if they are going to go, oh, I'm not showing you

my bits because you're a man, you can say, oh, my daughter will come and see you. Oh, okay. So that's been the case throughout Western history, that there have been women learning medicine in medical families. And the ancient Greek world's no different. There are women doctors. And there are women midwives who supposedly are, well, they're credited with having written books on medicine, which of course, are lost. So there is a tradition of women as doctors, which is great. you'd just love to know what they thought about this wandering womb stuff and squatting over a dead puppy and all of that. Like, is there a book somewhere written by a woman just going, nope, this is all gibberish? It would be great, wouldn't it?

The thing is, the only quotes we have from these lost books are told to us by men who, of course, pick the bits that fit with their theory. So you get the impression that the women were saying just the same thing. We don't know that. We just don't know. Again, go back to those papari. We need to find more papari. The Greeks seem to have a real thing about modesty and chastity in women. And I'm always quite interested in how this particular circle is squared. Because on one hand, you've got this narrative around women enjoy sex far more than men.

Women need to have sex for their wombs to be healthy. Seems to be something coming through. If you don't have sex, you might jump down a well, which is always a danger. So there's this idea that women by their very nature are weaker and need more sex. But then conversely, it seems like the nicest thing you could say to a Greek woman is that she's modest and chased. You see that turning up everywhere. What's that relationship going on? Somehow you're supposed to tame it all with marriage.

Once you're married, it's all fine. As long as you don't stray outside the marriage, it's marital sex is what you need, not just sex sex. That is complicated, isn't it? It's very complicated. It means your sub-mouse supposed to transform from this totally innocent creature into sort of sex-crazed wife performing in the bedroom. But only in certain conditions. Only in certain conditions. It's, yeah, it's extremely restrictive and complicated. You wouldn't be able to keep up with this at all. What was their view on monogamy,

just out of interest? Because, you know, women are sex-crazed maniacs and men are much more controlled. Monogamy, yeah, basically monogamy for women. But of course, men are perfectly okay having all sorts of other things on the side, whether that's women that they've taken captive in battle, you know, because why not? Or whether it's prostitutes, sex workers, whether it's having a sort of concubine on the side who is your regular extramarital partner. Men are expected to have extramarital relationships. Women aren't. There's nothing, you know, that's basically the historical position, isn't it, throughout Western culture? Yeah, that's pretty much it. Did they have laws around adultery? I know the Romans at some point were threatening people with death for daring, women for

straying outside the marriage. Yes. So again, it's quite complicated. So that if a man has a relationship with an unmarried woman, then that is not acceptable because she's the property of her father. So you're actually interfering with another man's property. So even though she's not married to someone else, so it's not adultery for her, it's a property relationship that you're interfering with. So there are problems with that. And of course, in lots of ancient cultures, if a woman doesn't cry out for help when someone rapes her, she is somehow guilty.

And if she says she cried out, but no one heard her, well, she's still guilty. It's a very serious double standard problem. You don't look surprised. No, no. It's just horrible when you see it. You just look back and you think, my God, it's awful the way this stuff is thought of and written about.

But my final question to you, although I could just sit here and talk to you about this, forever, you've been absolutely fascinating, is we are now thousands of years on from when the ancient Greeks were writing. We do not believe in wandering wounds or uterine suffocation or hot and cold bodies, but can you see an influence of this, these very early ideas continuing to this very day? I think if you look at the evidence today about whether women are taken seriously with body problems. That's pretty revealing, isn't it? So like how long it takes you to get diagnosed with things, endometriosis being the classic one, whether you're taken remotely

seriously when you say you're in pain, whether pain is seen as something as quite normal because you're a woman. So of course it's going to hurt. These things, I think, are still left as a residue from the sorts of things that were around in the ancient world. There's some fascinating material in the 19th century, of course, about anaesthesia in childbirth, painless childbirth, and people arguing, well, you can't possibly have painless childbirth because it's supposed to be painful. You know, and if it isn't painful, it doesn't work. And the Greeks are fascinating because they have different words for pain. So for childbirth pain, it's ponos, which is also the word you use for agricultural labour. So like hard work to get a result, it hurts and that's okay. Ponos. So child

birth pain is regarded as completely okay because, you know, you have to to get the result. And that certainly goes all the way through into the 19th century when anaesthesia and childbirth starts to come in. So that would be a really good example of the continuity. I was talking to my mum just earlier today. We got onto the subject of menopause and perimenopause. And she told me that when her mum, who really struggled with it, went to the doctor, it happened to her quite early. She was like 38 or something. The doctor's response was to go and have another. baby. That sounds quite Greek. Yeah, that's very Greek. Well, certainly, you know, when I was growing up with endometriosis, they always said, oh, if you had a baby, you'll be cured. That is just a

direct quote from the Hippocratic text. If she has a baby, she will be healthy. Well, no, and actually to sort of suggest that to an unmarried 16 year old, it's not terribly helpful anyway. Jesus. No, that is, that's almost the same as an ancient Greek woman just going in saying my toe hurt, them going, when was your last period, isn't it? It's like the same stuff going on and on and on. Yeah, I think it is. Helen, you have been absolutely fabulous to talk to today. I've enjoyed every second of this. It's great material, Kate.

It's great material. You can't go wrong with this material. Well, people do go wrong, and then you write academic articles about how wrong they've been, which are brilliant. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? All over the place.

I blog on mistaking histories. That's a WordPress blog. So I do some of my health stuff there. I've wrote a very short book called Greek and Roman medicine, which actually doesn't specifically talk about women. It just talks about medicine because women are part of medicine. That's my really short go-to read, Greek and Roman medicine. And I've got a book coming out later this year called Immaculate Forms with Profile Books, which looks at Clitoris, Hyman, Wom and Breasts, through time. Amazing. Oh, I look forward to that one. Thank you so much, Helen. You have been a treat.

Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Helen for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, you could email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from Elvis Presley's sex life to the myth and history of the menopause all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckmouth. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.

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