Conversations: Othering Women in the Origins of Western Medicine w/ Dr Christie Vogler (Part 1)
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Whoa, easy there. Yeah.

Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I'm here with a quick introduction. I actually... You'll hear. I start today's conversation episode by attempting to actually do the introduction in the episode because I'm trying to do that now so that I don't have this extra piece. All to say...

There's going to be a double me singing that song. But I am here with this extra introduction because I just listened back to this episode and so many things, so many things are happening. So I spoke today with Dr. Christy Vogler, who is a returning guest and who studies medicine in the ancient world, but specifically how medicine interacts with women in varied ways. And so I

This conversation, if you can believe it, is fucking fascinating. It's also only part one because we talked for an hour and a half and only got through half of what we wanted to say. And it's really good and really powerful. I can't wait for you to hear both parts.

But I have to share that since we recorded this on January 24th, which is just like really relevant because we were both slightly unhinged. You know, we'd just watched a Nazi salute performed at an inauguration and everything else that happened over the like three days in between us recording and recording.

and the fascist inauguration into the United States. And so it's just like there's a lot happening here. But Christy is also one of the hosts of the podcast Movies We Dig, which I have been on a couple of times. It's a really fun show with a bunch of historians and archaeologists who break down movies featuring the ancient world. And it's really fun. It's mostly about kind of a

and understanding the reception of it. But that's all to say, Movies We Dig is going to be the second podcast joining my new collective slash podcast network. So more on this to come. I mentioned it a little bit on Tuesday, but Michaela and I are founding something called Mnemosyne or The Memory Collective. And that is going to be a

collective of people like us and like Christy and like the wonderful people behind Sweetbitter that I mentioned on Tuesday, people who are trying to look and share history with the public that is

recognizing the impact that the patriarchal structure has had on that history in varied ways. You can find more information at collectivemem.com. I couldn't get memory collective or collective memories. Collectivemem.com. I'll link in the episode's description. You can find more information about what we're doing, but we're starting with a kind of a podcast network, bringing in some people doing interesting stuff and who are indie and could use a podcast network. And I'm going to be

So we're working on that. Movies We Dig is one of those. But it's also this collective is based in such similar ideas to what this episode is today that I wanted to make sure that I shared it all with you. We will be having more news as things come out. We are building this from scratch with absolutely zero funding because the...

Anyway, there's no guaranteed money in the podcast right now. And so we're figuring it out. It's going to be slow, but it's going to be really fucking good and really necessary. And really necessary. Really necessary.

really necessary. So today's episode just means a lot. It's a good introduction to Christy. We're going to be working together hopefully on a lot of other new things, hopefully more podcasts because there's just there's so much to say and I really want to be able to bring more of this information more than I can do just on this show. So there's going to be a lot more of that coming. And until then, please enjoy this podcast.

God's ancient history of medicine, Hippocratic medicine, women in medicine. And stay tuned because next week we got another big one and it just got more interesting, more infuriating, and more, I want to say empowering, but that's because I mean empowering today because rage is a good fuel, particularly when you're fighting fascism.

conversations, othering women in the history of Western medicine with Dr. Christy Vogler, part one. Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, for the first time recording an introduction in front of a guest. Woo! Because, yeah, woo is right, because it's a guest that I can inflict this upon. Thank you. I am here with Christy Vogler returning.

returning to talk all things now I'm going to be like should I just say medicine I just want to I'm excited yeah I that's kind of where we're at is uh we are we're talking medicine

We're talking Hippocratic medicine. Yeah. So to the listeners, Christy was on the show years ago now, I think. I think it might have been two or three. Time is so weird. Talking about women in medicine and specifically Medica and like that kind of line between witchcraft and medicine purely because ladies are involved. But then, you know, offline when you and I were talking about so many more things that maybe one day we'll talk about.

more publicly but in the meantime you have so much more and then you wrote a 20 page uh outline because you're awesome and have a very different brain than mine and I'm excited to talk to you about it yeah yeah yeah no I uh I listened to the our original conversation and I think you kept it in there it's like I mentioned scrolling through a 15 page outline last time and I yeah yeah

I like outlines. I love it. I have like this brand that wants to love outlines, but I also let they, I cannot. And also I love that in your email, you were like, you don't have to look at this. You could keep it a surprise. And I'm like, I appreciate that because it allows me to not feel like I've failed. Yeah, no, it's, it's purely for me because I like having a game plan and then I like ignoring my game plan. But if I need to get back on track,

there's the game plan it's there yeah i love that well it worked out great for the live recording that we did with movies we dig your other podcast just to promote it right in there yeah so you're at that that was my first big planning project for podcasts and involved um what six of us yes huge yeah which was so fun yeah i yeah we're we're planning to do it again um

Either soon or definitely for International Podcast Day again because –

It's a good excuse. There's a holiday. Why not? It's a good excuse to really work towards it. So, yeah. Well, I'm excited for that whenever it does happen. And in the meantime, I mean, Hippocratic medicine. So are you looking at Greece? Like, I don't know where to begin. Also, like, obviously, I want to focus on Greece, but I know you typically focus more on Rome. So like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So last time we spoke and I was talking about the intersection of magic and medicine and

And that's the title. Thank you for remembering it and name dropping it right here. Yeah, just to help it out. And what I was kind of talking about that was the medical pluralism that exists in the ancient world. Yes, my research really focuses on

the Roman Empire in terms of like the site I dug at and the the artifacts I specifically was looking at. But as an archaeologist, we love this thing called context. And so to understand, you know,

female medical practices, you have to study everything from like, okay, what is midwifery? What are actually magicians? What is the Hippocratic corpus? And, you know, where do people fit into all of these different ideas that exist in the ancient world? And strangely enough, Hippocrates and his supposed writings is what has

It's really scary to think about because we call Hippocrates the father of medicine and sometimes modern medicine. And if you think about that, he was writing what? Late 5th, early 4th century supposedly. And our medicine did not change for over 2,000 years. The same kinds of treatments that Hippocrates was using

Is the same treatments that were used in the Civil War and they were called heroic treatments that was like bloodletting and things like that. And we literally just Western medicine did not really change until we discovered germs.

I learned these things and I'm like, I wish I was surprised. But the West is just such a hard-on for ancient Greece. They were like, these people invented everything. It's just on its face so silly to think that we can't evolve past... It's how I feel... This is maybe taking it too dark. It's how I feel about...

What we call democracy, people have to get mad at me for saying this. I'm not saying that the rule of the people is bad. I'm saying that the form of democracy that the ancient Greeks invented was not actually the rule of the people and it's problematic. And this idea that in 2,500 years we've decided that there is nothing better than this one thing invented 2,500 years ago is...

is fucking wild to me and it sounds like that with the medicine like this idea that like they knew all we don't need to research we don't need to go any further let's just cut them open and hope for the best yeah oh yes and like oh man okay so you know in some ways it's i'm gonna present kind of a simplified version because there's there's so much involved and it's on the other hand

I got lost in my own thoughts there. I get it. On the other hand, it's, it's a lot of these ideas still make sense to us. Like a lot. So like Galen, you know, who kind of codified what he thought was the most important parts of the Hippocratic corpus is,

His whole approach to treating people is like, okay, first thing first, start with diet, then start with regimen, like what's your daily exercise look like? Then maybe we try some medications. And as a last resort, you go to surgery. And that kind of makes sense, right? Like your approach to treating someone, you want to be active.

Less invasive. You want to deal with certain illness. Overall. Like health overall versus specifically. Yeah. And so it's like a lot of these approaches make sense in some ways. Like some things haven't changed and...

You know, some of it's really intuitive. I liked, I think Jane Dracott just kind of talked about how, you know, Roman children would have been raised with an understanding of like health and how to maintain health, right? When you're a little kid and your parents tell you not to eat that, what do they say? Because it'll make you sick, right? And so it's like there are these ideas that are just what have humans done for millennia to...

to maintain health and so it's like on some level that makes sense of course well i think it's the problem is like when we don't pick out the separate the other stuff right because it's and that's what makes it i feel like that's what gets dangerous is because when a large part of it is intuitive and obvious and like yes definitely all of this is right and then it's like but then we have this like blockage so it's like well then everything must be right like leeches yep and

Yes, and we'll get into some of the issues that the medical corpus has created about our intuitive sense of things, especially when it comes to women's bodies. Because basically, again, very simplified, and we'll get into it. Hippocratic medicine is mostly based on the premise that the body that you are dealing with is the ideal, normal body.

air quotes, male body. Naturally. The moment you switch to a woman, well, it's already defective because it has a thing called the uterus. And the uterus does this really, really scary thing where it bleeds once a month and the woman doesn't die. What is with that? Right? And so it's wrong, obviously. The bodies are not the norm. Exactly. So when you're this entire...

This longstanding history of Western medicine is kind of really built for one size fits all. That part hasn't changed. It has not changed. Well, I think there's some parts that are working on it now, but like. Yep.

Oh, yeah. So like, I do. Sorry, just because this is like a modern thing I think about all the time now is like how like every type of medication or every type of like literally anything, you know, they'll there's so many things that they'll say, like, do not.

use if you're pregnant. And it's not because they know it would harm you or the baby. It's because they just don't test on pregnant people like ever. So it's just like, just don't not because it's actually a problem, but simply because we don't care to check. Yep. Yes. And the, you know, kind of a later problem that stemmed from is like women weren't tested in a lot of things for a long time. Like even if they weren't pregnant, because they,

scientists would rather presume like but what if you were or what if this affects your ability to get pregnant therefore we're just not going to test on women well yeah because the the womb as the growth mechanism is really all they care about they don't actually care about the human body oh i wonder what we're talking about that's fine it's everything's bad but like

Yeah, it's just so wild because truly it is this constant reminder throughout all of history and up until right this very moment that like,

The really only concern for the female body, and I say that like people with the uterus, like the concern is simply that they can create more men. It's not that they are a body being lived in by a human being equal to a man. It's that they, we need to be concerned with whether or not they are capable of creating more men. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I, yes, that is what this conversation is going to be about for sure. But I also wanted to kind of think back on, so I, last time I talked to you, I brought up like three different passages. One was, um,

the story of Aeneas getting healed by his mother Venus, but also the surgeon Iapix who's, you know, performing surgery on him. And another one is the story of Agnodike who all of these women were dying during childbirth. So she disguised herself as a man and got training and she started saving the lives of women and

And what I liked about both those stories is that the reason Iapix became a healer is he wanted to take care of his elderly father. The reason Agnodike went through this huge deception and training and facing the court was she wanted to save the lives of the women in her community. And that's an etiological story. We don't think that's historical fact any more than we think. Venus carrying her son Aeneas is historical fact. But what those stories show is

And I think why medicine is so important is that the people who are in medicine, I think a lot of them do it because they do. They want to take care of the people in their lives, in their community. And what's hard is that in order to legitimize and push the knowledge and advancement of

of those individuals to save people's lives is you have to create this institution. And this institution has very different goals than what the individuals within it might have. And so it's like, I do want to posit that because I know from last time, it's like, we definitely had like nurse practitioners and other people involved in healthcare. You know, they're part of the system. And I think that's,

We have a love-hate relationship with healthcare. And I do want to just point out that the individuals involved, there

there are people who actually care and want to use all of this history and all of this knowledge to help people, which is, I think, important to appreciate. So absolutely. No, that's yeah. Thank you for saying that. Cause it's hard. You get caught up in the system because the system is so oppressive that it is easy to get stuck in that versus thinking of, yeah, these individual people who actually are just out to do good and, and,

unfortunately sometimes the system is stopping them or or preventing them or just like manipulating the way that we are seeing that we understand what is you know help um but it is yeah the primarily the system that's yeah and that's like it's funny to talk about that like i'm sure far worse for you as an american but it's funny to talk about this system as like this system the overarching system itself and like you know we're not even getting into like the actual individual like

system in terms of how it hurts people, but even just like the broader idea of learning about healthcare and the evolution of it or lack thereof over the last 2000 years. Yeah. And that's kind of where my research was coming from and what helps me

Feel a little bit more grounded in it because it's like I'm working from the assumption that, OK, here is likely a woman at this villa in Ganjavecchio who appears to be practicing medicine. What does that look like? What are all of these things happening around her that are impacting the way that she is interacting with her patients? And, you know, so I started at the very individual level and then I get and then you go into everything individually.

That is around that. And that's when it gets, I don't know. I feel like I was holding my breath for a moment. It's like, we have to dive in to so much craziness. And it feels sometimes crazy.

like where to begin um and I I think that's kind of what I realized from our last episode I panicked actually because it's like I've given two more presentations an invited lecture and I've taught a history of medicine course twice since the last time I talked to you and it's like surely I have new things to say and then I re-listened to the episode I'm like oh no I've said too much did I say it all

I forget that like, you know, conference presentations are 15-20 minutes in length and we talked for like an hour. It's so funny for me to hear that because like, I don't do any of that side of it. I just love these conversations and I can get these experts to talk for so long, but I've never thought about it like that. I'm also like exhausting knowledge in certain ways.

And so I was just, I was like, oh no, what will I do? Do I have anything new to say about Medica? And I'm like, okay, yes, yes, I do. But I also realized that, you know, when we were talking about rational medicine, biomedicine, I didn't really get into what is Hippocratic medicine and, you know, why we did talk about how like women who practice more folk medicine, like how they're kind of

being stigmatized as a competition, as something opposite of that. But then what I'm looking at is women who decide they want to enter into that system and practice medicine in that manner. And I'm really curious why. Why not just be a MAI? Why not just be a healer, wise woman or something like that? Why choose this path? And so that's

I, I, that, that was kind of the question I was coming from. It's like, okay, we got to talk about Hippocrates. We got to think about why do these women decide to enter the, uh, a realm of medicine that has eventually been gendered male. And then the other big question, and this is what I had been covering mostly is who's listening to that woman. Like what authority as a physician does she have to tell a patient you need to do this?

And, you know, if you think about that, that's really interesting because a lot of these individuals are women, for one thing. A lot of them are of former slave status or slaves themselves. Hmm.

And so who does that medica get to treat? How seriously will that patient take her? Because the other kind of interesting thing to talk about is as a patient, you have a lot of agency. You don't have to listen to a doctor and follow their directions. You do get to choose if you're going to take your aunt's

recipe over some some guy trained in alexandria right and i thought that was a really interesting question too is like this role has a certain level of authority to it um which i think is also appealing to women in ways that like a service job of like doing hair or um

you know, weaving or something, you don't have that kind of authority over another person. So that was kind of a, one of the other ideas I was, I've been exploring more recently. So all that to say is like, that's, that's what we're going to try and cover today. And I'm sure it will be a winding path, but yeah. No, I mean, I love all of that. I'm trying to decide like where

I mean, you have your outline too, which is great because I just want to hear everything. But yeah, why don't we start with like a little bit on this Hippocrates guy? Because I'll admit that my knowledge of him is pretty highly based on Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which means it's not great. But also, you know, could be worse. It could be worse. That's that's I forgot Hippocrates is in that game. And watch a bunch of little quests with him. Hippocrates.

You know, okay, so yeah, let's talk about Hippocrates of Kos, born circa 460 BCE and died around 375 BCE. As I mentioned, so unless you play Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the only other time most people have heard about Hippocrates is the Hippocratic Oath. Yeah. Because it's something that doctors still take today. They take a different version of it, but...

That's usually how they know this guy. And as I mentioned, he is often referred to as the father of medicine or modern medicine. Here's the thing. We barely know anything about him. Like, he is almost on the level of Homer in my mind, except we have, like, some contemporaries who talk about him. So it's like we know he was probably a real person. Yeah. Like Socrates is what I'm imagining. Yes. Very much so. Yeah.

And the funny thing is, is like, even though his name is on the oath,

It is very unlikely he actually wrote the oath because what made him interesting is that he started teaching people how about medicine for for payment. And the reason that that's a big deal is because usually you kept that knowledge within the family. So the oath actually has a prohibition against teaching people medicine for payment because that means you're basically sharing this knowledge outside of the family.

It's ironic today. Right? Yeah. It's a whole different thing. And yet, you know, you've got families of doctors too. Like it is a weird, a weird thing, but yeah. So it, we know very clearly that Hippocrates at, you know, didn't follow at least one of the tenets of the oath that he is supposedly had authored. That's funny. Yeah. Um,

Yeah. So what we do know, again, he originates from Kos, which is a Greek island, part of the Dodecanese, which is in the southeast Aegean Sea near modern day Turkey.

And then we do have a group of letters and speeches dating to around 350 BCE, which depict him as a wise sage, a patriot who refused to take Persian gold and serve their king, and a wonderfully versatile doctor capable of treating both a monarch's lovesickness and the great plague of Athens, which I don't know if he cured the plague of Athens. Yeah.

In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, he helped and so did Cassandra. That's fair. That's fair. Okay, it's canon. Great. Great. Literally, and by helped, I mean you go and you just have to throw a bunch of bodies on the fire because Hippocrates tells you to. But still.

So, oh my gosh. Yeah. So do we have his writings or just to like maybe guide along? So we're going back to Socrates in that case, right? We don't know of what we call the Hippocratic Corpus. We don't know of like if he authored any of it, if his students authored it, or if people just using the name because it became popular with medicine authored it. And yeah, yeah.

Let's see. I think he's also mentioned Plato actually talks about him. And we learned from Plato that Hippocrates was an Asclepius, meaning he was supposedly descended from Asclepius, which also legitimizes his role as a healer. And he's one of the ones that tells us that he's teaching medicine for money. Plato causes so much trouble about figuring out what is an actual ancient fact and what is just like him making shit up.

Yeah. Well, what's really interesting is we it is likely that Hippocrates or the writings of Hippocrates and his students was popularly known in Athens because there's this great article. I forget who wrote it. I'll have to read it.

come back to that. There are plays where a character goes mad. So Euripides, Heracles. And if you listen to the description, I have to find it. If you listen to the description of what this madness supposedly looks like, it is

Very similar to descriptions from On the Sacred Disease, which is about epilepsy, of what symptoms of epilepsy look like. So there is a line in Euripides' Heracles where madness is talking to Iris, the messenger goddess. And she says, behold him. See how even now he is wildly tossing his head at the outset, rolling his eyes fiercely from side to side without a word, nor can he control his panting breath.

Like a fearful bull in act to charge, he bellows, calling on the goddess of another hell. I love your rip, but he's so much. I haven't covered that play, but it's, I need to. Yeah.

And so like it's been pointed out, it's like this language shows that like these playwrights are reading or aware of Hippocratic texts because they're using that as inspiration in their plays as descriptors. So it definitely seems that like it's not just Plato. It's like other people are aware that this corpus exists and they're engaging with it in some manner. Yeah.

That's really interesting. I bet you there's stuff in Orestes too that would kind of have similar. Yeah, there's a few different examples. Yeah. If you're a parent or share a fridge with someone, Instacart is about to make grocery shopping so much easier. Because with family carts, you can share a cart with your partner and each add the items you want. Since between the two of you, odds are you'll both remember everything you need.

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So I thought that was just a cool. And I had sent you earlier. I sent you clips, right? Of different TV shows, Domina and HBO's Rome that are very much taking like, oh, here is how medicine is described. We're going to play it out in our show for entertainment and for drama. And I only watched half of the one from HBO's Rome because I went, oh, yeah.

That's okay. Okay. I get the point. That one's great for two reasons. One, it illustrates how public treatment was. To the listeners, which I can link to it too, but basically one of the characters in Rome, Titus Polo, everyone's favorite, is getting essentially brain surgery in someone's house in front of a crowd while he's awake. That's the most you need to know. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, you know, it kind of highlights this point that like doctors are craftspeople. They're not, you know, for the most part, they're not elites and they have a business to run. So they perform in front of an audience.

which I love that aspect. And then towards the end of the clip, when the doctor is leaving and he's explaining directions of like, you know, expect this and this and this. And then he turns and goes, oh, maybe sacrifice a white rabbit to this deity. That helps sometimes. And I love that because it's a great example of like, you know, the doctors are supposedly being all rational. It's like, but if it makes you feel better. Yeah. Like just in case. Yeah. Couldn't hurt. Yeah.

basis yeah and i love it because it's such a great example of yeah patients would feel very reassured if a doctor is like okay do this and this and this but also you know talk to the gods see what they can do for you yeah well it reminds me of like i mean the you know that this is

maybe it's still connected in ways I don't know but you know just going back to Hippocrates as like a child of Asclepius or a relation of Asclepius you know like before they had you know that side of early medicine they were relying on the gods and relying on Asclepius and there's all these

incredible pieces from Asclepian temples where people would leave like dedications in thanks or in prayer for healing of like their different body parts and stuff. And so I imagine like

for a long time with this transition to medicine in any kind of form, like you're still dealing with people who are very tied to their deities, who trust their deities. And like, you need that kind of balance, even if it's just for that, you know, almost the, what's the word I want of like a placebo effect, right. Of like going for, yeah, that, that, that aspect that gives you comfort culturally. And, and that makes a big difference.

Yeah. And it's, it's really interesting. That's like a, what could arguably be a major shift in,

with Hippocratic medicine is the idea of like illness has some kind of rational explanation. It's not caused by supernatural things like the gods. So like if you were going based just on the corpus, you would think that like they like the healing cults and these other protective amulets and things like that. You think doctors would just totally be like, ignore all of that.

No, they are actually partnering with these healing cults to legitimize their own practice because we see things like dedications of plaques or surgeon's tools or things like that from doctors to Asclepius.

We also know that later in the Roman period, they formed these things called collegia, which are like fraternities or clubs for different professions. And one of the things that the doctors collegia does is they apparently, and I don't know what this looks like, hold a contest of doctoring during the festival of Asclepius. And I'm like, what does that look like? Like you get a bunch of people that need stitches and you see like who does the best. Who does their best.

Yeah, that's both fascinating and terrifying to imagine. Like, I feel like it could go many ways. Mm hmm. Yeah, I like that. Well, I mean, it's yeah, just to relate it to modernity, like people don't take that well to particularly intellectual people.

coming in and saying, you need to do this thing because of all of these science reasons. Like, get vaccinated. You know? Like, there's still this... There's people...

don't like to have their knowledge questioned or challenged or what they believe already. They don't want to have that challenge. So it's really smart as these early, you know, workers, like, I mean, I'm sure it's also just happening, happening very naturally because this is just coming about culturally, but like to be still so aligned with the gods and,

Yeah. Was a good idea for lots of reasons, like in terms of just, yeah, making their point come across. Yeah. And, you know, again, going back to this question of authority, it's like, why would you listen to a physician versus a priest, for instance? Again, the partnering with the healing cults of Asclepius makes a lot of sense because do you know when those cults become very popular in Greece and then later in Rome? Like what major event prompts it?

Well, later in Rome, I mean, I would have assumed the Peloponnesian War, but maybe not. Oh, no, not wars. We were talking about earlier, plague. So the plague of Athens. Oh, naturally, right. Yeah, the plague of Athens. And then later, I think about a century later, Rome starts to experience a plague that lasts about three years. And so they consult the Sibylline books and they're like, dude, bring this Sclepius over. So...

Introducing the cult of Asclepius becomes a state action and has official recognition versus there is no law or certification or anything for doctors. You can just claim that title. Yeah.

But when they really need help, they're going to bring the cult over from another culture that they've conquered and colonized. They're going to bring it over and be like, well, this is magical. We'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. And the doctors come with them because they figure it's like, oh, the state recognizes this. So if we show we are associated with this, then people will pay for our services. And did a lot of Greek doctors come along with the cult of Asclepius then?

We see a huge, like for Romans, Greek medicine is foreign. And there's actually, that's why there's kind of, there's an anti-Hellenism movement in Rome because they don't like all of these ideas coming from the East, from the Greeks. And one of the big ones is medicine. God's history repeats itself, doesn't it?

Well, and you get people like Pliny and Cato writing about how like doctors are shifty. They'll poison you and sleep with your wife. They go to sleep with your wife. Do you not have any other concerns? Honestly, get your house in order. And so you shouldn't trust them. You should do your own doctoring is basically like the instructions given by, you know, that's kind of the early reaction to something that is

But also think about like what kind of people are being brought into Rome? Slaves. Slaves with medical knowledge. Why would you listen to them? Why would you trust them? Yeah. I love this job. I love these conversations. I love connecting it to the modern time because I think it's really important. But... Sorry. No, you're good. A lot of my forget exists. But I just like...

it's so exhausting it's so exhausting seeing dumb shit from 2000 years ago just be repeated now because western and I'm gonna say that because I mean ultimately I just mean the type of western people that consider themselves so fucking descendant from things like Greece and Rome that they're like

Just so unable to see the value in foreign people. Like it reminds me of like all of the immigrants from India who are full blown doctors, but like they come to North America because they want to. And they like, like legit can't be doctors here. And you're like, these people are doctors.

We could have more doctors. Like, Canada may have free health care that Americans love to, you know, brag or compare themselves. But we have no health care. Like, it's free, sure. If you're in an accident, you won't die. But there are so few doctors. And there's so little access to care that, like, if you have cancer, you're probably still fucked. You won't go bankrupt, but you might not live either. And it's, like, there's just so many doctors. But we have this utter fear of foreign or, like, Eastern medicine and how, like, transplants

Chinese medicine is like fucking great and they've been doing it a really long time. And, you know, but like the West is still so like, anyway, I also grew up in a crazy hippie household. So that's coming through here. It's just, yeah, it's wild to me to, I mean, I'm not surprised at all, but why can't we just like foreigners when they bring really great and valuable things? Why do we have to be scared of them? Cause they're Brown. I don't understand. Well, especially considering the Romans, um,

forced them to come over half the time too. Well, and then there's another country that did that too. We might call it. Yeah. That's the thing. Well that, but that's colonialism, right? Like I had this conversation with somebody else that's going to air probably around this time, but we're talking about the colonization broadly and like, yeah, I mean the, the, the utter irrationality of colonizing countries like specifically Rome and Britain and America, I will say, cause I, Greece did not do this to the same degree. Um,

But like those specific colonizing countries and how they just sought to take over land that wasn't theirs to steal it, to imprison, to impoverish, to destroy the lives of the people living there. And then when those people who were colonized and forced to become part of the empire, when those people then went to the, the like center of the empire, suddenly they're fucking hated and racism becomes what it is. And it's like,

It's so lacking in rationale, which like all of, you know, obviously that's the issue with understanding it is that like, it is just evil. And so you, if you're coming at it with like empathy and a rational mind, you can't understand it, but like,

It's just so fucking wild. Like Rome enslaves all of these people and then has the nerve to be afraid of the fact that they have fucking skills from before they were enslaved by the empire. And it's like, you know, that, that country over in that place, you know, settles and colonizes land that was inhabited by other people for 2000 plus fucking well, 5,000 years and,

And then they're like, oh, my God, these people keep, you know, keep getting angry at us for taking all of their land and stealing their houses. And they keep attacking us for for I can't imagine why we're now we're just surrounded by enemies. And oh, my gosh, what are we going to do? And it's like, well, if you hadn't killed everyone and stolen their land, you wouldn't be surrounded by enemies. But we're not going to say it like that. Like, nope.

Anyway, back to Rome and being mad that their enslaved people were good at stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Decompress a little. They don't know how to have conversations anymore. I don't know how to do it. Everyone, this is being recorded on Friday, January 24th for context. Thanks. Well, and trust me, it's just going to get worse because I haven't even gotten to the women part of it yet. Sick. Oh, okay. So, um...

Yeah. Sorry. I really like went off. I probably won't. No, it's OK. No, it's like, yeah, I when I got to the end of my outline, I was so mad. And, you know, we'll get to that. We'll get to. OK, so when we we talk about this guy, Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Oath and supposedly the

saving or ending the plague of Athens or whatever he's doing in Assassin's Creed. Usually what we're really referring to is this corpus that I've mentioned a couple times, which again, we're not really sure who authored. It's unclear if any of the treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus were the work of Hippocrates, students, or just others using the name because I think we talked about that last time. Sometimes you pick a name and

So people will listen to you. And I think we, I use the example of like supposedly there's a cosmetics manual written by Cleopatra. Yes, that Cleopatra. And there's another really interesting example. There's a rare text supposedly authored by a woman and her name's Metrodora. And it's titled On the Conditions of the Womb.

It's a late antiquity work to the like it's dated around the first to sixth century CE. So it's definitely after Hippocrates. Yeah. And it's based on gynecological concerns. But it draws heavily on the Hippocratic corpus, which I've hinted at, like why Hippocratic medicine is not great when it comes to women. So you have this woman writing a text that is basically just relaying very similar information to like earlier Hippocratic medicine. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the only medical text attributed to a woman author to survive from the Greco-Roman antiquity. But do you know what the name Metrodora means? Dora is in there. That might help.

I know it's when I should. No, I'm not going to get it. It's a, it means gifts of the uterus. Oh, Dora. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. Gifts of the uterus. Okay. That reminds me that there is, I mean, one that immediately reminds me of the like, quote unquote, husband of Sappho, whose name is just like man from man Island or Dick from man Island, something like that. Um,

And it's like, yeah, oh, we're supposed to believe that's real. Sure. I'm sure she killed herself over a guy named Dick from Man Island. But aside from that completely, and just like for a silly thing that's so similar, there is a...

uh an ancient greek sex manual that is attributed to have been written by like a servant girl of helen because like it's the same thing of like just giving yeah oh who was going to be the most sexually promiscuous woman in ancient greece well it would be helen so obviously one of her one of her women wrote it like obviously yeah and you know i cannot

You know, there's actually a huge argument over is Metrodora a woman or not a woman? And it's like, it's pretty obvious the name is probably a moniker. But, you know, there have been studies done on names and how certain names like somehow drive people into certain professions that relate to it. So it's like.

There's some psychology there, but more likely than not, like someone adopted the name to further legitimize the information being written down. As someone whose name, like original given name is Alexandra Oliva and ended up in this profession. I don't know. I don't think that there's any connection to that at all. No, not at all. For this white girl in Canada whose parents gave her a bizarrely Greek name.

Well, and mine's like, I was born five days before Christmas. And like, so my name is Christy. It's like, I don't feel super Christian most of the time. And then I later learned that like Christos, it means it's Greek for the anointed one. And I joke, it's like the oiled up one just for fun. Hell yeah. And I'm like, maybe, maybe, maybe there's something to it. Who knows? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and even if it's just that you can find those connections later, like, that's fun, too, which is what I think is real with mine. Like, it's, you know, but I love it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, so, yeah, the the the claiming of the name Hippocrates probably was some dude practicing medicine back in the day, but like...

He just kind of became the authoritative name you throw on on text, medical text so that they get accepted. And it's pretty interesting. So I wanted to mention I talked a lot about Vivian Newton last time who wrote an entire book on ancient medicine. And I referred to Vivian as a she. He is not. He is a lovely elderly British man with.

um a very feminine name here in the United States I got to see him give a British name sometimes so I'm correcting the record on the first episode to share show how we grow and learn over love it love it also the North America I get it there's like there's an awful lot of Evelyn's in the UK that are men and I go okay no I just I'm gonna get used to that I get it yeah yeah Leslie I know is another one that like

Yeah. So anyway, according to Newton, Hippocratic Corpus is it's made up. It's about 60 works written in the ionic dialect of Greek. And it's the collection we have today only dates back like have physical copies of dates back to 1526 when the Aldine Press in Venice printed the first edition of the complete works in Greek and

And it's clear from the manuscripts that a great majority of the texts printed in that year had already been circulating together under the name of Hippocrates, possibly as early as the first century CE, if not 300 years earlier when Hippocrates was

roaming the world or so. And what's interesting is like it is kind of a confusing collection because it seems that it was assembled at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, which makes sense because the island of Kos was part of the Ptolemaic Empire at that time. So that's part of the reason we still have the Hippocratic Corpus is it was preserved at the Library of Alexandria. The other reason that we

have all of this information about Hippocrates is because a lot of Greek medicine was adopted and preserved and copied by later medieval Islamic civilization.

This is something I want to find a way to talk about in like a whole fucking episode is the way that the Muslims preserved like an enormous amount of what we have from Greece and Rome was preserved because of Islam. And we love to forget that in the West. Same as Homer. Like we would not have Homer if not for that. So that's good to know. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, part of my history of medicine course, we do spend a long time looking at how Islamic medicine built upon the work, like what the Greeks and Romans had done with it and preserved so much of what we still have today. They're also why we still have medicine.

Homeric medicine or not Homeric uh Hippocratic medicine until we discover germs in the late 1800s so they can't be all good it's really interesting though because like there are case studies where um the physicians in the medieval period will write about how like supposedly the Greeks and the Romans could do this thing like a tracheotomy

I don't know how. Because they forget they lose the practical knowledge of doing some of the procedures and everything. And so there was this guy who was just like, and then

It's kind of a tragic story. A young woman had tried to unalive herself using a knife, and she did it in such a way that allowed this physician to conveniently test a tracheotomy out. And he's like, it is possible. And that's all we get of her story. Oh, my God. Yeah.

So interesting case studies like that. Yeah. And it's interesting because why just focusing on the Hippocratic writings is so problematic is because medicine is a practical skill. Yeah. It's not just theory. It is practice as well. And so you can preserve the theory all you want. Yeah.

it's how you put it into practice that can that matters more over time so yeah yeah to get into so you know i don't know you there's so much about to talk about when it comes to i mean medicine broadly and women specifically but like so you you know you hinted at it with the hippocrates that just on its face women were just like not men is that kind of like yeah like so yeah what like what was kind of going on they just were sort of not

studied or just like assumed to be this like yeah incorrect form of a man or what how so how does that work logically when you're like well which one came first buddy anyway yeah sorry yep nope that's a great question and um i i have to drag aristotle into it and natural philosophy because um he he

I don't like him. He very much complicates this idea. I recently did some searching into Aristotle on women. And yeah, okay. Now I'm ready for this. Yeah. So again, on the surface, all human bodies are basically the same. They have these things called humors. And they are hot, cold, dry, wet. And there's a balance of those within the body. Okay.

But women have this really weird organ called the uterus. And if it falls out of balance, which it does all the time because women go through this monthly regular process of bleeding, that's not normal for men. So they're obviously sick all the time because of the uterus. And therefore, there is kind of this interesting question then of,

How would a doctor actually practically approach a female patient then? Do you operate on the base of all of these diagnoses that are the idea of the wandering womb? Like your womb has gone up your chest cavity and is sucking the blood out of your brain and you're hysterical.

Or thinking back to my episode with, uh, uh, oh shit. Helen King. I'm going to say it again. I'm thinking back to my episode with Helen King, which is women are wet and spongy. And yeah, this, yeah. Okay. Yep. So the uterus is going all over the place. What are they going to do? Yep. Yep. Or is the symptom a headache?

And you just treat it like a headache, like you would with a male patient. What makes more sense? And like, you know, that's kind of a big question because the Hippocratic corpus would be like, well, female illnesses all have to do with the uterus and the cure for that. Not great. The treatments for any complaint of the uterus, just not great for the most part. And we'll, I'll definitely get into more of that. Or do you go with the approach that in humoral,

It's like, oh, you have too much blood in the brain and therefore we're going to give you a pharmaceutical treatment that reduces blood pressure or something like that. Like something maybe actually reasonable and helpful.

And I don't know that like the that answer isn't always clear because a lot of the medical texts are focused on diagnosis and a lot of ancient texts aren't necessarily concerned with case studies and the results. So we're told how to figure out what a problem is, but how to treat it, but not how well that treatment works. Right. Or whether that was the problem to begin with. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. It reminds me of we, I think we talked about this last time, not on the podcast, I mean, because you and I just haven't had calls, but I think we both, did you see Nosferatu? Or were you going to see it? I have not. I need to. It's coming on streaming soon. So I just, there's a lot of moments that are done so well where it's just like this woman is having all these health issues and they're like, well, she's just, it's very clear she has too much blood. Just get rid of some of that and that's

even over half of the doctors it's just well obviously she has too much blood and it just made me laugh every time and she's like okay yeah no sure yeah I'm sure that's definitely it and it's not just that you could have just learned a different body type there just happened to be two in all in all all creatures there are two sexes and I'm saying you know not gender sex like and obviously there are still more than two but like

Come on, guys. Like this idea that women are just like broken versions of men, even when animals have diversity of sexes. Like, what are we doing? Why? Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So. So, yeah. So just a refresher here. Here is the basic idea.

What does Hippocratic medicine put forth as the idea? So Hippocratic medicine does cover all aspects of health of the individual, including mind and body. So there it's really interesting of looking about, you know, Galen and other people talking about stress. What is the impact of stress on the body? And, you know, some what is kind of really nice about the healing cults of Asclepius is I asked this of my students is like, why might you feel better?

going to Epidavros. You go there, you're out in the countryside, coast out of a big city. There's a giant theater so that you can listen to music or like decompress and be entertained. There's walking. Like, I wonder why people feel better when they go there. Um, and those are like legitimate treatments in Hippocratic medicine as well. Uh,

So that's really important. And I think I mentioned it's like Hippocratic medicine, again, is like they don't believe according to the corpus, they don't believe in divine intervention. That doesn't happen in practice. But the idea is like there is a rational, natural cause of illness. And as I mentioned before, it's like treatment usually kind of follows a particular order where you start with like, you know, look at your diet and your regimen.

Then medication and the last as a last resort surgery because, oh boy, surgery does not work.

It's a last resort now, so I can't imagine back then. Yeah, exactly. They avoid chants, charms, and exorcisms because that falls under the realm of magic and folk medicine. Again, not necessarily happening in practice. Right. Because it is useful to include some of those things in your practice for the comfort of your patients, and it might convince your patients to listen to you. If you're doing something that already...

yeah they would have done that they feel oh okay my doctor knows what he's talking about yeah yeah i love that well i just like that connection to like you got to keep it you got to keep it up with the gods because that's what people that's the culture that's like the that's the world i we still like right like if someone's sick you on social media you'll you'll see people like ask for prayers or send prayers like that's

It's still something we practice. Yeah. As an act of comfort. Or as my mother would say, send white light. Because again, I grew up in a very specific household. Exactly. But it's still the same idea, right? Yeah. You leave room for the supernatural to do its thing. Because sometimes maybe that's the little deciding factor at the end of the day. Who knows? Let's see. This is where...

Things get dicey. It claims a basis in empirical fact and sound practice that rejects flimsy philosophical hypotheses like Aristotle's explanation of conception and the difference between men and women. It doesn't do that.

And we live with the consequences of that over time. So, okay. So it says it rejects that, but in practice, not at all. Correct. Right? Okay. Can you remind me, Aristotle, on women and conception? Okay. So basically...

It's Eugenio Derbez. Did you know that with Boost Mobile, you can cut your phone bill in half this tax season? Yes, half. Buy six months of service and get six months free. That's a full year of service paying half. That sounds good, doesn't it? And all on the Boost Network with 99% nationwide coverage. Don't wait. Visit your Boost store today. Requires upfront payment, taxes and fees extra. Terms and exclusions apply. Visit BoostMobile.com for full terms.

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So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code GIFT. Aristotle's the one who kind of comes up with the idea that...

We also see this again in the Greek play of, oh, shoot, what is it? The Eumenides. Is that the right one? When Orestes has to go and there's a trial and Athena's involved. And the Furies are basically arguing. It's like, hey, he killed...

his parent, it's a blood crime, therefore we get to harass him. And Apollo shows up and makes the argument that women are just the vessels. They don't actually contribute any matter to the embryo. And therefore, because Clytemnestra was just a vessel and that Orestes was wholly, is it Orestes? I think that's right. Wholly made up of Agamemnon goop,

He is not guilty of a blood crime for killing his mother. And it also- This could be video, just because I don't know what to say, and my face is saying a lot. Yeah. Again, a good example of how these different ideas are showing up in our entertainment. Yeah.

And so another way that Aristotle puts it is that like women provide matter, like some kind of base. He actually talks about it as a cheese process. Like the men's seed activates it. And that's what actually gives it form into an infant. Yeah.

There is some disparity. There are like some major differences. Like Hippocratic medicine actually leans more towards the idea that men and women in the womb are both pretty similar and their natures can be really similar. But over time, like based on exposure, you might end up being more wet or more dry. And that will impact on how manly you are.

Hippocratic medicine also, instead of Aristotle kind of arguing that women are just a vessel, Hippocratic medicine is of the idea that men and women contribute something, and they are like seeds. And depending on which seed overpowers the other one will give you a masculine woman or a wimpy guy and things like that. So a lot of interesting competitive ideas happening there. Yeah, yeah. I just...

Yeah. Okay. So they're telling men not to moisturize. I don't know. I'm not asking for a real answer with that. Don't worry. But it's what it sounds like. Be dry, guys. Dryness equals manliness. Yeah. Yeah. There's, anyway. So again, even though the, the writings is claiming one thing in practice, this isn't necessarily happening. Um, what else have we got? Uh,

Even so, many, if not most doctors and their patients continue to leave a place for the gods with healing. We said that. Yeah. So leaving a place for the healing. If you actually read the original Hippocratic oath, it opens with, I swear by Apollo, the physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses that according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this oath and this contract. So like, again, aligning themselves with God.

the state institutionalized cults and cultural practices to legitimize themselves. Because again, there's no board certification doctors here. There's just... Just swear into Apollo, the guy who says women are just a vessel. And so this was kind of what I talked about in our last conversation is like, okay, so what was Hippocratic medicine doing? What were these physicians doing to legitimize their practice, to get people to listen to them?

So, again, aligned with Asclepius. In Rome, they also do another thing where there's a wide variety of medical practitioners participated in the Quinta Quatrus, which was a festival to Minerva. And it included a procession around the city of different craftspeople. So you would have, so that was one way is like you would visually show yourself off by parading around the city as a doctor. With your tools. Yes.

With your tools, along with weavers, fullers, dyers, teachers, painters, and engravers. Like, that's just a fun party. I like that they're all aligned in that way. Like, along with, you know, kind of artists, yeah, and craftspeople. Yeah. Yeah, and that's, again, in Rome, why it becomes kind of like this weird discipline, right? Because it does require knowledge. It does require, at least if you're practicing Hippocratic medicine, literacy. Yeah.

along with physical training and you're being paid for a service. So it's such a weird mix of intellectualism and that's what poor people do is work for a living. Yeah, yeah.

And eventually, like later, you do have what, you know, what they call armchair doctors. It's like I just read all the medical texts, but I don't actually practice any. That's what kind of happens going into the medieval period is like you have these people who continue to copy and comment and, you know, develop new ideas on medicine, but all on paper. They don't actually go out and practice it on people. Yeah. Yeah.

It's always an interesting discipline in that way. Yeah. It's like researchers today, except that they do all of this practice practical stuff alongside that. But it's like the same. It seems like the same idea where you're not like a practicing physician, but you are, you know, advancing things. But today it's like, well, that also requires you to actually go get practical knowledge, though, to not just the books. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why medical school takes so long. Yeah. There's a lot there. There's a lot to do, including learning a foreign language, Greek and Latin. You have to learn Greek and Latin to practice medicine. Back then? Today. Really?

Think about it. Think about how they talk about muscles. Your gluteus maximus. Oh, right. But not like, yeah, yeah. No, true. Yeah. True. Yeah. Yeah. So interestingly, body parts anatomy, Latin. Yeah. Medications, Greek.

Oh, I love that. That's so interesting to me because I always find that my brain picks up on like etymological links now that I know, you know, little bits of Greek and Latin. And so I always love kind of piecing those together when it comes to like scientific terms and stuff, which tend to use them. But I didn't know that there is like an actual kind of like line between what we use today.

Yeah. And so like what a lot of colleges will do is people who are on pre-med in order to get students more involved in humanities, what classics departments will do is offer a medical terminology course because they're going to have to learn all of these ancient words.

Terms in Greek and Latin. So that's a pretty common course offered by a lot of classics departments at colleges and universities that are associated with a medical school. Yeah. I love that. That's fun. And I mean, it's just such, yeah, maybe because I'm an enormous nerd for etymology, but still, it's fun. I would take that.

No science otherwise, but that. When you start to understand a Latin-based, like, English is so useless sometimes. Understanding a Latin-based language and learning Greek helps you comprehend so much more than just English will allow you to. And so...

That's a good reason to go learn dead languages, people. It's useful. I mean, even the little, you know, like I don't, I've not had the chance to learn Greek and Latin, but I have a brain that I am fairly certain now is autistic and picks out all of those things and finds the, like, and I just like everything I see these days because of how much Greek and Latin I've taken in over this career that like, I swear, like every word now I'm like, oh my God, like I do this with plants.

um my friend all the time and i'm just like did you know that like what was it oh philodendron i just came i was like oh that just means friend of trees and it just encouraged me the other day looking into like a plant i was like i'm just looking to buy something i'm like oh philodendron just means friend of trees and i just love that what little greek i know can allow me to be like oh a little thing i just learned um

hippopotamus river horse I love it well that's the best one and that is why I maintain that the real river horses are the this is the dumbest but that the the horses that come when Arwen

makes like an elvish prayer in the fellowship of the ring whilst she is carrying Frodo on horseback and the Nazgul are nipping at their heels and I won't pretend like I don't have that memorized but I will not recite it here but that elvish spell pulls in the river horses and those truly that is that's a true hippopotamus because actual hippopotamoi

do not and that is me realizing that i also do greek plurals when english wouldn't make sense uh but yeah are nothing like river horses and i love that for them i'm pretty sure if people do want to hear you say that spell you said it on the episode you came and talked about uh spartacus with us did i yeah because i've made this same dumb joke

Oh, wow. I'm cool. That's terrible. That means I must have mentioned hippopotamus before too. So like we're both guilty of it. It's so sad that I've done that before. Okay. But speaking of etymology, does that mean that Hippocrates means like strong horse?

I think so. Right? Great. Strength horse. Got it. And Kratos. So love it. Love it for him. He's a strong horse. Yeah. And an Asclepiod. And apparently like anti-Persian. Who knew? Even at cost, that feels like you're just, you're anti-whoever, you know, it seems more appropriate at that time. Yeah. Also, like, that doesn't seem very doctor-like. No. Yeah.

But it does seem very Greek. It does. It does for sure. Yeah. Oh, okay. So, so since the last time I spoke, I learned about another way that Hippocratic medicine was actively differentiating itself from the

folk medicine and witchcraft. And so to get in that, humoral pathology, I've mentioned, it's these four humors, right? They kind of, for a long time, they only talked about three because they're like, I don't, but they want four. They want four humors because that is a better balance than three. But Greek loved threes. That's a surprise to me. They did. But then this whole hot, cold, wet, dry dichotomy, it really needs a fourth.

And so black bile, no one really knows what black bile is. Like they're just making shit up at that point. Yeah. This is where my English literature degree like melds with my classics degree in terms of Victorian wild shit.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe you know this then because like this was something I was amazed to learn. So humoral pathology and these four things. And it's not just so you've got it's tied to the seasons later in medieval Islamic medicine. They tie it to like particular constellations. And so like star readings were just as important to your health as like anything else. Yeah.

In this system. The Zodiac girlies are loving that. Yep. Yep. And legit. Like. Yeah. Those star charts matter. They obviously impact your health. So. This is. Remains so prominent. That. Carl Linnaeus. Another father. A father of taxonomy. Used it. To. Create. A. This was just like infuriating to learn. To. Help.

taxonomize humans. That means... So he was saying in Systema Natura that there are four species of humans based on race. Very much suggesting that they...

Humans are somehow different species. And if they interbreed with each other, then they just create more defective types of humans. Oh, he's the father of eugenics too. He is. He did contribute to it. Yeah. Yep. You nailed it. Humoral pathology is used to help build ideas of eugenics and racial science.

measuring those skulls as we always should and so so humoral pathology then is these four humors and you are considered healthy when they're in balance in your body right so if you get too much of one or if one gets closed off and starts pulling around the body part that's bad and they also have they're a dichotomy they're opposites of each other

So if you were going to treat someone who, for instance, has a fever, you would use treatments that would cool the body. So like you take a bath, you eat cold foods. So it's this idea of you restore balance through the use of opposites. That's just the basic principle of it. And for a fever, that makes sense. And I imagine it's little else. Yeah.

Again, it's like one of these things. It's like, okay, every once in a while. Yeah.

They're doing things that make sense. I mean, a stopped clock is wrong twice a day. Exactly. And there are other approaches. So, like, there's a group of doctors called rationalists where they thought therapeutics were primarily based. So this is the rationalist approach. They're based on opposites, treatments that countered imbalances. Other approaches included empiricists. They sound fun because they just do everything by trial and error. Oh, good.

Oh, good. That's what you want with medicine. Exactly. And then there's Methodists. And they were just more of like, we're going to be gentle about how we treat people. So they're the ones really promoting like walking and singing and rocking or swinging and a swing to like feel better. And it's like, I feel like I really would have wanted to be looked at by a Methodist. Yeah. Like it feels like risky in the long term, but so much nicer in the short term. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, again, it's like humoral pathology didn't like practice in practice, like not everyone's doing the exact same thing. Not everyone's approaching medicine the exact same way. But this idea of treatment by opposites versus folk medicine is based on this premise of homeopathy. And homeopathy is pretty closely tied to sympathetic magic. The idea that you deal with something like attracts like.

So really famously, like the evil eye is as a protective charm for the evil eye. One, it's blue because there's this cultural assumption that people with blue eyes are more likely to cast an evil eye. I didn't know that. I love that. So when you get a charm of it, it's usually blue. Like you can go to Greece or Turkey today and get one of these. Yeah, they're everywhere. I love it.

And, and it's fun because like what the idea is like that charm would actually draw the evil eye to it. And there's some, you know, sometimes there's just like little small beads and stuff. So I've heard like Greeks talk about how like if you lose the charm, that means that it no longer had the power to like take in the evil eye. So that's why you lose it.

And so that's kind of how sympathetic magic works. And we see some of this idea, again, going back to Pliny and Cato, because folk medicine in general, it's based on this idea of homopathy. So the idea that like affects like, a concept recognized in discussions of sympathetic magic like the evil eye. But it's also talked about with menstrual blood. Right.

I forget who it does. I think it's Pliny. Talks about how menstrual blood is super dangerous. It will wilt crops. I know there's someone who talks about if a pregnant woman comes in contact with it, it could jeopardize her pregnancy. It could render men impotent. So dangerous. Yeah.

But also the cure for those things is menstrual blood and or like something of like that has a similar nature to it. So according to Ripett, these are well chosen description. Oh, who said it? I have to find it. Yeah. Male writers like Pliny said, menstrual blood is a monstrous thing and a great evil thing.

and it's because it was polluting and it could cause harm. But to make sense of the apparently paradoxical nature of menstrual blood as both contagiously corrosive and healing, it's necessary to appreciate three independent ideas. And I need to go back and say, this is Pauline Ripet's article that I've pulled from before I've talked about. She wrote on Roman women, wise women, and witches. And she's the one who's like, okay, we have all of these

literary descriptions of witches. What could that actually tell us about the practice of folk medicine based on these literary descriptions? Um, so, so this nature of menstrual blood or other things that witches are using to treat things, um, the explanation of illness or harm comes from excessive flow or stagnation, both of which resulted in decay, withering, or, and

and wasting that's not unlike some of the humoral pathology ideas in terms of like you can have too much of something something's out of balance but folk healing appears to have depended upon the idea of transference of illness and health bringing factors between bodies so health as an absence of illness and you remove the impediments to health then health remains so like you kind of like the idea of like sucking poison out of or venom out of a bite is

That's kind of the same idea. So instead of treatment by opposites, which is humoral pathology, the rationalist approach, folk medicine is all about using things of a similar nature to draw out what is causing harm. And so the theories themselves are different.

And I think that it's interesting to look at as just another way that Hippocratic medicine was distinguishing itself from folk medicine. Yeah. Can I bring up? Okay, so this is a thing that you've just led me to.

start to ruminate on with that explanation of menstrual blood. So that idea that it is like, I'm going to simplify for my point. Like it's basically both poison and curative. Right. Yeah.

So are you familiar with the Euripides play? The I just covered it and it's like one guy's very three letter name.

Um, so there's a Euripides play, which apparently the word will never come to me, even though I just looked up it. But anyway, it's the one where Creusa's son, she was raped by Apollo, and her son is the named character whose name I can't remember because his name is just literally the title of the play. It starts with an I, and I've lost it so completely. Thank you. Oh, it's just an Ion. Jesus Christ. I appreciate it.

Anyway, so in the Ion, there is this truly bizarre reference to Gorgon blood. And I, it's funny because I had to go through it when I wrote this big old piece on Medusa and this reference.

Gorgon blood is so separate from the other mythological details of the Gorgons that it really feels like I, in my section of this book, I called it the Phlegrian Gorgon because the story is that this Gorgon...

In this play, it said that this was a Gorgon killed during the Gigantomachy in southern Italy, instead of basically separating this Gorgon from the Medusa of the Gorgons. But this Gorgon's blood is said to be both curative and poisonous. And it's like this one reference to a Gorgon's blood being anything like that. It doesn't really exist anywhere else. And now I'm like, oh, shit.

Euripides is playing with this idea I assume like that's so cool and it makes it so much more interesting and already the ion is the most fascinatingly feminist play so just to like add that oh my god it's so good it's literally about how Apollo is a rapist and how PTSD from assault in women is real it literally treats this woman's sexual assault by Apollo as the trauma of

that it would be it's so good it's still you know had to be Greek at the end and like so it's wrapped up in a bow and Apollo isn't in trouble but then it also has this reference to this blood which then she wants to use to kill her son that she doesn't know is her son because he's working for Apollo and it's this whole wild incredible thing but oh my god just makes me love Euripides even more basically to say like oh no there's almost no way he wasn't connecting to this idea for sure I mean and again

happens in medicine, right? Like there are certain things that if you have too much of it or if it's not treated or compounded in a certain way, it's poisonous and toxic to the human body. In other instances, it's chemotherapy, right? Like again, these ideas have, we still are engaging with them in our medical practices today. There's just more

rational science behind it, but those concepts don't go away of like things that could cause harm can also be healing in some manner. So like, yeah, I'm not surprised that again, it is really fun to see how playwrights are actually engaging with medical texts as well. Cause you don't necessarily think about it that way, but yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and now I just can't get over it because it's like this Gorgon that already is like this completely not like doesn't fit into any of the other Gorgon stories and has this bizarre blood that we've otherwise never heard of. And yeah, to have that link, I'm just now obsessed and wish I could have written it into that book. Yeah.

Well, and I mean, that makes sense because Gorgon's eyes are also apotropaic. They're kind of, I imagine they're similar to the evil eye and same as giant penises by the Romans. Yes. Somehow apotropaic. The whole Gorgon face is apotropaic, like just the Gorgonian as a concept. Yeah. So to have that.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, if you think about it, that's how they operate, right? They assume that you are bringing evil to it. And so you fight evil with evil. You fight fire with fire is kind of the idea. Yeah. So I thought that was that was just kind of an interesting thing. I had noticed that, again, in practice, people were using both. Yeah. Because people will do whatever it takes to regain health, to maintain their health.

Like, yeah, that just doesn't change. I'm not going to get over this idea of menstrual blood being so like poisonous to like and corrosive because it's like, did no one just think like we could check? Like no one thought like we it's not hard. Like we've all got, you know, uteruses in our lives, even if they you know, we don't respect the human attached to them. Like why did anyone test it?

I mean, it's such an... Like, menstrual blood is, again, it's one of these features of a human body with a uterus, a functioning uterus, produces menstrual blood, right? And it's actually not harmful to the woman herself. Yeah. Which is interesting. So that means... But blood in general, like, you can't go and...

And you can't go to a sanctuary, some place dedicated to gods or immortality, because if you introduce that, it pollutes it. Right. So menstrual blood is polluting. But women are immune to that pollution or they're inured against it. And that's also, you know, we tie a lot to who is responsible for handling the dead and preparing the dead in ancient Greece. It's women because they're already polluted.

polluted to some extent that they can handle the miasma of a dead body. They can handle mortality in a way that the gods or men are not predisposed to. It's so fascinating because it's simultaneously like so empowering and so reductive and gross. And like, it's like this, it's this recognition that

You know, we're saying women, we do mean people with a uterus, especially now more than ever. We do mean that. But yeah.

like when it comes, it's, it's important to say women in the ancient world because it was coming with this very heavy burden of like existence. So, but like they, they were able to recognize that women that uterus has held this like enormous power that they would never be able to harness. And all they could do is like,

use you know like really just dehumanize to the point of being able to utilize this uterus outside of its human body but at the same time like it's just it's so I don't know it's so wild it's so wild to me it reminds me of and I think this is another timely thing to say in this episode but

I saw a TikTok the other day where a person, I'm going to assume they were a trans person based on this context, but that they were replying to a TikTok video of a woman who had asked with very compassionate sincerity, asked for someone to explain why conservatives are so fucking afraid of trans people. And this person's response will live with me forever. And I feel like it's kind of what I've experienced

It's kind of what I've just never been able to fully put into words, but like what, why I push the way I do in this show, but it's that,

That, you know, the conservatives and by that we do mean the patriarchal structure is so afraid of trans people because they can't control them in the way that the patriarchy has learned to control women. Because they have used everything you're saying is this, like these 2,500 years of

finding the this method of control right the dehumanization the fact that people with a uterus are just incorrect men that they can just be used and controlled and so when we have trans people who are say women but don't have a uterus or men but don't have a penis you know we're

They are this enormous threat to the patriarchy because they cannot be controlled by that patriarchy and it's why white women who are so fully deep into the patriarchy are, you know, just as against trans people as the men and I mean obviously beyond white women but we all know that they're the biggest problem.

And like, yeah, it's just so wild to me. And it just is like, yes, all of that is so true about the patriarchy conservatives and their utter fear of trans people because they cannot be controlled. But it is also so in line with the struggle of women for the last twenty five hundred years because we are all struggling against the patriarchy. Like literally, it's not about, you know, who's got a uterus or who doesn't. It's about this struggle against the patriarchy. Yep.

Anyway, you're just giving me all the origins of it and I love and hate it. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I'm finally to the whole focus of our talk and we're only, what, an hour and a half? An hour.

It's like, where do women fit into all of this? Hippocratic medicine nonsense. And, you know, I've talked about that. We've mentioned it a few times. It's like, all right, women are inferior bodies to men because of the uterus. And you know what the solution to all of their problems is? Have sex and get pregnant.

Well, naturally, because then they're of use. Yeah. Because that's the only time when women are of use to the patriarchy is when they're full of another baby. Well, that's how you stop the bleeding.

Yeah, well, of course. And that's why that's the right way to be. Because once you're fulled up with the baby, you're not going to bleed. I just, like, I want to scream all the time. It's literally, it's just like, people just, it's like... And considering the reaction to Pixar's, what is it? Going Red, turning, that movie. Oh, yeah. I forget what it was, but yeah. Yeah. The period movie. It's like, some things have not changed. Yes. No, but yes, like, it's so, it's so wild. And it just...

everything when the more I learn about this stuff and the the ancient world but also up until today is like it's just what what stands out so much is this bizarre lack of curiosity this bizarre disinterest in examining a body that is different from your own like why are you so afraid of learning like why are these men this patriarchal structure like why

I mean, I know why ultimately when I phrase it like the patriarchal structure, because if they know too much about women, if they humanize women and recognize that no matter your gender or sex, like we are all fucking human beings, then like they are, they lose that control. You cannot control a population that you treat as equal to your own. And so the more, you know, and, and,

It's just so much more nefarious now that because white women have been granted this like just the tier below the men that they now will uphold the patriarchy against, you know, marginalized people of all types. And it's just like it's so fucking wild. And I guess I could just keep talking about this forever, but it's just fucking fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why Hippocratic Medicine is.

And I have a tentative title at the top, like women's patients with Hippocratic medicine. We'll get into the word patients too. Yeah. Is that not only have you stigmatized a folk medical practice that women are heavily involved in.

You're also using your ideas of medicine to define the female body as inferior, not just in it's like more likely to get illness, but saying that it's incapable of thinking in a rational manner. So it is intentionally trying to not only.

de-legitimize folk medical practices and we see this in the language of the epigraphy it's trying to say that women are not capable of even rational medicine and that's what you see in the epigraphy or a lot of like references to women to medica is like despite her gender or she practiced like a man like there is this element of like it's the dehumanization she can do this despite her sex yeah

Thank you all so much for listening. Please check out more on the Memory Collective, my new, my and Michaela's new collective of people doing interesting stuff for the public. If you want to learn more about history, specifically how history has been impacted by the patriarchal structure in which we live.

collectivemem.com. Again, it is linked in the episode's description. And check out our first two podcasts joining this podcast network within the Memory Collective, Sweet Bitter and Movies We Dig.

We are going to be bringing you as much as possible because I just think that this is really important stuff and I can't wait to be a part of sharing it more widely. Let's Talk About Miss Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pengawish is the producer, the Hermes to my Olympians, and the co-founder of this new memory collective. Select Music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of my own goddamn podcast network, The Memory Collective.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for our newsletter where we will be sharing information about the Memory Collective as we have it, mythsbaby.com slash newsletter. Thank you all so fucking much. Rage against the goddamn patriarchy. Burn this shit to the ground and punch a Nazi while you're at it. I am Liv and I love this shit.

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