ABSTRACT
By looking both at the cultural context in which Hippocratic gynaecology was created, and at the subsequent uses of that gynaecology in medical history, this book has explored two different senses of ‘reading the female body in ancient Greece’. I have shown how heavily the things said to women by gynaecology in the Western biomedical tradition have relied on the uses of Hippocratic texts and of an idealised classical past. With the history of hysteria we have come full circle, and return to Isaac Baker Brown who thought that, in clitoridectomy, he had at last discovered a simple, surgical cure for the condition. The full irony of his strategy now emerges: by misreading one Hippocratic text on the excision of warts, he was finding the cure for a condition that depended, for its very existence, on reading other Hippocratic texts by a process of selection and omission that significantly altered the meanings they had originally carried.
