The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence

Helen King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317022381
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

By far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud through a detailed exploration of the ways in which two classical stories of sexual difference were told, retold and remade from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Agnodike, the 'first midwife' who disguises herself as a man and then exposes herself to her potential patients, and Phaethousa, who grows a beard after her husband leaves her, are stories from the ancient world that resonated in the early modern period in particular. Tracing the reception of these tales shows how they provided continuity despite considerable change in medicine, being the common property of those on different sides of professional disputes about women's roles in both medicine and midwifery. The study reveals how different genres used these stories, changing their characters and plots, but always invoking the authority of the classics in discussions of sexual identity. The study raises important questions about the nature of medical knowledge, the relationship between texts and observation, and the understanding of sexual difference in the early modern world beyond the one-sex model.

PART I
Revisiting the Classics

Chapter 1
Making Sex and the Classical World

As we saw in the Introduction, Laqueur’s Making Sex is a publishing phenomenon. From their reactions, I suspect that what intrigues readers is not the ‘two-sex’ model, since to them this seems a familiar and ‘natural’ way of thinking about the body, but instead the ‘one-sex’ body with its notion that men are women with their ‘insides out’ – and vice versa.1 This model reduces the historical and geographical variety of pre-modern Europe into a single image, imposing on it a misleading uniformity, while privileging ‘modernity’ and giving us, as its representatives, a sense of intellectual superiority.2 It also suggests that pre-modern Europeans lived with ‘the potential instability of their sexuality’, as the position of their organs was not fixed once and for all.3 In Laqueur’s version, the ‘vice versa’ aspect is played down, and instead of being a model of reciprocity, with all organs being shared, differing only in location, it becomes one that favours the male. At one point he argued that the ‘one-sex model’ ‘can be read … as an exercise in preserving the Father, he who stands not only for order but for the existence of civilization itself’, going on to say that ‘In a public world that was overwhelmingly male, the one-sex model displayed what was already massively evident in culture more generally: man is the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category’ [Laqueur’s italics].4 The corollary of this is the suggestion that ‘the male body has no history’.5 As we have already seen in discussing the inside/outside model in Aristotle’s Masterpiece, however, in the late seventeenth century challenges to any view of man as the measure were able to draw on earlier texts, from the sixteenth century and even before.

Yet Laqueur asserts that the ‘one-sex’ part of his model ‘dominated thinking about sexual difference from classical antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century’.6 In this and the following chapter, I shall begin to reflect in general terms on the claims for this extended heyday of the one-sex body; although, if we were to combine the existing literature critical of Laqueur, we would find it a surprisingly brief phase. For example, Katy Park commented on the medieval period that, ‘Before 1500 I could find no convincing expressions of the idea of genital homology at all, even as an alternative to be discarded, except for a few brief passages in the works of several late medieval surgeons’; even in these writers, as Patricia Simons further noted, the reference was ‘quickly made in a sentence or so, and was usually noticeable for its isolation’.7 Park remarked that, while ‘Laqueur is correct to point out the power of Galen’s one-sex body in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European culture, … he wrongly assumes that it spent the intervening centuries percolating along.’8 However, others working on early modern Europe have raised issues even with this ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century’ timing. Russell West-Pavlov, following Ian Maclean’s comments made nearly 30 years earlier, notes that ‘By the end of the 1500s, most medical textbooks had rejected the Galenic theory of the parallelism of male and female genitals.’9 Yet medical textbooks are precisely the sources favoured by Laqueur. Furthermore, Patricia Simons has recently referred to Laqueur’s assumption that a ‘one-sex’ body goes with a ‘two-seed’ model of conception in which both men and women have testicles and make ‘seed’, and has argued that ‘The death-knell of the two-seed and one-sex idea was already beginning to be tolled as early as the mid- to late sixteenth century.’10 This leaves very little time for the glory days of the one-sex body; perhaps only from c. 1500–1550.

But what about the classical world, with which Making Sex began, and to which Laqueur attributed the ‘one-sex’ model? Sally Shuttleworth may have been the first to challenge Laqueur’s reading of the classical texts, noting that the ancient Greeks considered women a totally separate race, which sounds more like a ‘two-sex’ model; while she did not give references, this idea is found in the eighth-century BC poet Hesiod. He described the first woman, Pandora, as a later creation than man, the origin of the ‘race of women’ (Gk genos gynaikôn), with ‘the mind of a bitch’ and a womb-belly ravenous for food and sex.11 But Shuttleworth’s challenge has not been picked up.12

It is striking that, despite his claims to be covering the period ‘from the Greeks to Freud’, as the subtitle of his book puts it, and his presentation of the ‘one-sex’ model as ‘hoary already in Galen’s time’, Laqueur’s use of the classical material is very restricted; he was clearly reliant on those ancient medical texts available in English translation at the time he was writing.13 Because he argued from such a limited sample, he did not realise that Galen’s remark is just one expression of sex difference in ancient medicine; and, indeed, just one expression within Galen’s own work. In this chapter I shall discuss the shortcomings of Laqueur’s analysis of classical Greco-Roman medicine, which led him to emphasise genital anatomy at the expense of the physiology of menstruation. Like him, I shall start with Galen, returning to the key passage from On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body already mentioned in the Introduction, before looking at Galen’s own sources: Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle. A ‘one-sex’ model was only one version of the body, even in the ancient world; Galen’s presentation of it is not straightforward, while Laqueur’s use of Galen is patchy.

Location, Location, Location – Galen14

Although Laqueur regards the inside/outside model as pre-Galenic, he presents it as having been expressed in a particularly succinct way by Galen before it carried on into the seventeenth century. Before looking at the alternative models of the sexed body in antiquity, we therefore need to explore Laqueur’s use of Galen in more detail. Galen is central to the story because Laqueur asserts that ‘Across a millennial chasm that saw the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, Galen spoke easily, in various vernacular languages, to the artisans and merchants, the midwives and barber surgeons, of Renaissance and Reformation Europe.’15 It is hard to understand this reference to ‘various vernacular languages’; Galen wrote in Greek, but was transmitted mostly in Arabic and subsequently in Latin translations.16 In Renaissance and Reformation Europe, very little of Galen’s work was translated into anything other than Latin. The start and end dates of this ‘millennial chasm’ are difficult to fathom; the rise of Christianity is conventionally dated to the conversion of Constantine in 312 AD, and the Fall of Rome to 476 AD, although in both cases these are processes over several centuries rather than these culminating ‘dates’. If Laqueur meant to identify an entire millennium from c. 300 AD to 1300 AD as the ‘chasm’, then Making Sex does indeed omit this period almost entirely, even though it implies continuity right across it in the comment that, via Galen, the one-sex body dominates ‘from classical antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century’.

Galen’s overall model of the body, divided into three regions dominated by the brain, the heart and the liver respectively, was highly influential in Arabic, and then medieval Western, medicine. As we have already seen in the Introduction, he wrote that:

All the parts, then, that men have, women have too, the difference between them lying in only one thing, which must be kept in mind throughout the discussion, namely, that in women the parts are within [the body], whereas in men they are outside, in the region called the perineum. Consider first whichever ones you please, turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you will find them the …same in both in every respect.17

What is the status of this passage? It certainly does not represent a summary of anatomical studies; human dissection did not feature in Galen’s world. It is clearly a thought experiment, and is introduced as such – ‘Consider …’, ‘Think …’ – with Galen going on to invite the reader to ‘Think first, please, of …’ and ‘Think too, please, of the converse …’.18 Can we take this apparently isolated passage as evidence that Galen believed in a ‘one-sex’ body? Patricia Simons suggests instead that, for Galen and also for later surgical writers, the one-sex model was ‘an introductory teaching device’, ‘more an aid to visualization and memorization than the summation of a complex theory of sexual oneness’.19 One of Laqueur’s most trenchant critics, Katy Park, has gone further, alleging that the one-sex body model should be dismissed as merely ‘a specific idea contained in a couple of paragraphs of a single book of a single work of Galen’. But this, as I shall now show, is also misleading.20

From Laqueur’s endnotes it is clear that his comments on Galen are based on just three works: On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, On the Natural Faculties and On Seed, the first two of which were available to him in 1990 in relatively recent English translations. On Seed, in keeping with its lack of an English translation before 1992, is cited only once.21 Even within this limited range of Galen’s works, Laqueur could have found much more that is relevant to his theme; in particular, in On Seed. Like the bulk of On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, this was written between 169 and 175 AD, so we cannot know whether it is developing the brief comment from On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, or On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body is summarising On Seed.22 There are many points of similarity between the two discussions; both, for example, use an analogy between the female organs of generation and the eyes of the mole, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Making Sense of Making Sex
• PART I REVISITING THE CLASSICS
• PART II PHAETHOUSA
• PART III AGNODICE
• Appendix: Agnodice in Latin and in Selected English Translations
• Bibliography
• Index