Agnodice in Parts

In this chapter I want to draw together some of the conclusions that result from focusing on these two classical stories and the changes in how they were read and used over the period during which Laqueur’s historical ‘rupture’ was supposed to be taking place. As we saw in the Introduction, he makes this supposed shift from the ‘one-sex’ to the ‘two-sex’ a far more hierarchical, one-way movement than did his main sources, Galen and Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and his Making Sex has already been criticised for its focus simply on the genitals. In the classical and early modern worlds, as we have now seen, the body was sexed far more widely; models which Laqueur would label ‘two-sex’ existed throughout the period of his ‘one-sex body’, and in these sex could extend into every part of the flesh. In addition to considering the significance not only of the organs, but also of the fluids of the body, we need to look at the other parts of the body on which the fluids were thought to have an effect. In Chapter 1, I drew attention to Galen’s comment in On Seed that ‘A person who sees a bull from a distance recognizes it immediately as male, without examining its organs of generation … We also distinguish man from woman in this way, not undressing them first so that we may examine the difference in their parts, but viewing them with their clothes on.’ ¹ I also noted there Artemidorus’ belief that a woman’s dreams about growing a beard, having a penis, wearing men’s clothing, having male body hair ‘or something else virile’ were interchangeable; the organs of generation were not privileged. In terms of the two stories I have been examining, looking at Phaethousa from the outside would suggest that she was a man, but undressing her would have solved the puzzle, although there is no reference to the physicians doing this. Perhaps, like Agnodice, this aspect of Phaethousa’s case story should be read alongside Caelius Aurelianus’ claim that ‘it was finally decided by the ancients to institute female physicians, so that the diseases of a woman’s private parts, when they needed to be examined, would not have to be exposed to male eyes’; it is possible that examining Phaethousa in this way was simply not an option for the physicians in the case story. ² Agnodice, however, plays with Galen’s formulation, changing her clothing so that those who cannot go beneath it assume that it must be telling the truth about her body, and only when she chooses does she reveal her normally hidden parts to prove her ‘true sex’.