Hygiene in the early modern medical tradition

"reading" the body as well as the texts. Helen King examines how the healer could read the body and avoid being deceived by it, and what made reading a female body different. In Chapter 3, it is the case histories in the Hippocratic Epidemics that are subjected to scrutiny, with particular focus on one specific case of a girl who died after a nosebleed. In Chapters 4 and 5, the author turns to Greek religion and myth again. In the former, she looks especially at the place of female puberty and of the parthenos in Hippocratic medicine, the importance of menarche and comparisons between menstruation and sacrificial bloodshed, as well as at the cult of Artemis. The fifth chapter discusses temple medicine as it appears to have been practised at the temples of Asclepius, and attempts to work out in what ways the female experience of this healing was different. (References to non-European cultures have become practically obligatory in classical scholarship. While, for example, Amazonian or Yoruba customs are fascinating in themselves, it is questionable whether they are a great help in understanding ancient beliefs.) Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with drug therapy, focusing on pain and "contraception", and 8 and 9 with the gender of those providing treatment and care for women. These last two chapters address the apparent absence of midwives and nurses in the Hippocratic texts and later attempts of these two professions to claim ancient origins. The two final chapters investigate the use-based on misuse or misunderstanding-of Hippocratic texts in later centuries for the construction of the disease entities chlorosis and hysteria. If there is the occasional sense of dejai vu, this is not only because some of the material has been covered by Lesley DeanJones and Ann Ellis Hanson, but also because several chapters are updated versions of previously published material. This may explain the fact that the quote by Seymour Haden about women patients being at the mercy of male doctors appears as.an epigraph to the introduction as well as three more times in the text. It may, on the other hand, be a marker for the author's programme, for this is a book with an axe to grind. Much of its argument is constructed on the framework of the use of medical theories and tradition by male doctors as a means of controlling their female patients. It seems a pity that the considerable scholarship that has gone into this monograph should not have resulted in a more even-handed account. (To give an example, to what extent was later misinterpretation of ancient texts the result of deliberate manipulation rather than insufficient scholarship?) Classicists will find the absence of any original texts and the use of the Loeb translations disappointing, but this appears to be a deliberate move in order to make Hippocrates' woman accessible to a larger audience. It will nevertheless appeal to some medical historians and in particular to those with an interest in Women's Studies.