ABSTRACT
The discussion of contraception in the previous chapter raised the issue of the gendering of knowledge through examining some of our assumptions about contraception and abortion in the ancient world. In this and the following chapter I will be discussing the ways in which later readers of the Hippocratic works have used these texts in defining the roles of nurse and midwife as naturally ‘feminine’. In the process, I will be putting forward models for the role of women in healing which, I will argue, are more appropriate to the social context of Hippocratic medicine. In our culture, the roles of nurse and midwife are so firmly feminine that exceptions need to be qualified as ‘male nurse’ and ‘male midwife’; in the seventeenth century, many writers deplored both the word and the concept of a ‘man-midwife’ (e.g. Douglas 1736). I will be arguing that, where Hippocratic materials have been used to support the role of nurse as one linked particularly closely to feminine qualities, the history of midwives demonstrates that more complex connections are possible between Hippocratic texts and subsequent debates. Midwifery has been a contested field since at least the seventeenth century, and as such it has seen more than its fair share of versions of reconstructions of the past.
