25 Jul 2026
issue 25 July 2026
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The McKinsey Institute says that health outcomes for women are less successful than those for men, and it has been argued that men should take a greater interest in the problem. We have names of about 50 female doctors from the ancient world, and one wonders what they made of the male theorists’ views of their bodies.
Health in the ancient world was understood to depend upon the balance of the four ‘humours’ (liquids) inside the body: yellow bile (vomit), black bile (from the spleen and liver), phlegm and blood. Having no idea what the purpose of menstruation was, doctors argued that women’s soft and spongy bodies tended to corrupt their blood, which the body very sensibly expelled every month. But it was retained during pregnancy, because (as Aristotle thought) it provided the raw material for life. When male seed entered the womb, it acted, as he said, rather like rennet on milk: it coagulated it and turned it into the material from which the foetus was constructed, and into breast milk.
