ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the various versions of Agnodice's time with Herophilus reflect changing ideas about women's roles, and shows that a focus on the two sexes as different accompanies an insistence on a separate branch of medicine for women. It presents an overview of some users of the story will give a sense of the changing contexts in which Agnodice featured during the period when one- and two-sex ideas of the body coexisted. The popularity of Agnodice grew in the period in which the Gynaeciorum, a substantial printed collection of ancient, Arabic and contemporary texts on the diseases of women. It became more popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it interacted with changing ideas about midwifery, female modesty, and the appropriate sex for those treating women both in childbirth, and beyond. The theme of education features strongly in one of the earliest retellings of Agnodice's story after it was printed in 1535.
