The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World
Medicine, Divinity, and Gender
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15026417 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Flemming (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 87 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 565-590 |
| Publication date | 2013-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Bulletin of the history of medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-5140 • E-ISSN: 1086-3176 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/bhm.2013.0064 |
| PMID | 24362276 |
| PMCID | PMC3904772 |
| OpenAlex | W2027965778 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 13 |
The article examines the understandings of, and responses to, reproductive failure in the classical Greek world. It discusses explanations and treatments for non-procreation in a range of ancient Greek medical texts, focusing on the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, which devote considerable energy to matters of fertility and generation, and places them alongside the availability of a divine approach to dealing with reproductive disruption, the possibility of asking various deities, including the specialist healing god Asclepius, for assistance in having children. Though the relations between these options are complex, they combine to produce a rich remedial array for those struggling with childlessness, the possibility that any impediment to procreation can be removed. Classical Greece, rather than the nineteenth century, or even 1978, is thus the time when “infertility,” understood as an essentially reversible somatic state, was invented
Ancient Greece · Ancient Greek · Ancient history · Art · Biology · Childlessness · Divinity · Fertility · Hippocratic Oath · Infertility · Literature · Political science · Pregnancy · Sociology · Traditional medicine · Classics · Demography · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Reproductive Health and Technologies
Reproduction
Are Old Men Impotent? On a Sparse Discourse of Early Modern Medicine and Its Forensic Implications in Paolo Zacchia’s Quaestiones medico-legales
Potent males and patent females
Fertility, Slavery, and Biblical Interpretation
Was the Woman with the Flow of Blood Drunk? An Exploration of the Possibility that She Was Viewed as an Anus Ebria
Mater Matuta, ‘Fertility Cults’ and the Integration of Women in Religious Life in Italy in the Fourth to First Centuries Bc
Louise Bourgeois
Before sexuality
Infertility around the Globe
The Symptom and the Subject
On Sterility (‘ HA X ’), a medical work by Aristotle?
Making Women's Medicine Masculine
Hippocrates' Peri Partheniôn ('Diseases of Young Girls')
Diocles of Carystus
Scientific Change
La Maladie et les maladies dans la Collection Hippocratique
Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science
Adoption in IV. Century Athens
Curses and Blessings in Ancient Greek Oaths
Coping With the Gods
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,88 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |