Conversations: Othering Women in the Origins of Western Medicine w/ Dr Christie Vogler (Part 1)

Liv speaks with Dr Christie Vogler about the long and storied and utterly infuriating ancient history of women's medicine in the West. The video clips referenced: Competing Medical Practices in Domina: Livia & Augustus's story in 'Domina' - Part 21 https://youtu.be/sWWwJeSbCIU?si=we-YcZWlskbxrB9p; Medical Pluralism on HBO’s Rome: Rome Pullo has surgery HD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro9tn-wN9-0; and if you want to see the transition to modern medicine in the late 19th century, check out the series The Artful Dodger: The Artful Dodger | Official Trailer | Hulu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUrjasNOnPM. And check out Christie's podcast, Movies We Dig, https://www.movieswedig.com/ soon to be joining the newly established Memory Collective collectivemem.com podcast network! Submit your question for the next Q&A at mythsbaby.com/questions http://mythsbaby.com/questions and get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So, check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So, this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:39Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I, I'm here with a quick introduction. I actually, you'll hear, I start today's conversation episode by attempting to actually do the introduction in the episode, because I'm trying to do that now so that I don't have this extra piece. All to say, there's gonna be a double me singing that song. But I, I am here with this extra introduction because I just listened back to this episode, and so many things, so many things are happening. So, I spoke today with Dr. Kristy Vogler, who is a returning guest and who studies medicine in the ancient world,

• 2:20Liv Albert?

  but specifically how medicine interacts with women in varied ways. And so- This conversation, if you can believe it, is fucking fascinating. It's also only part one because we talked for an hour and a half and only got through half of what we wanted to say. And it's really good and really powerful. I can't wait for you to hear both parts. But I have to share that since we recorded this on January 24th, which is just like really relevant because we were both slightly unhinged. Um, you know, we'd, we'd just watched a Nazi salute performed, uh, it, it at an inauguration. Um, and, and

• 3:00Liv Albert?

  everything else that, that happened over the like three days, um, in between us recording and, and the, um, fascist inauguration into the United States. Um, and so it's just like there's, there's a lot happening here. But Christie, um, is also, uh, the host of one, or one of the hosts of the podcast Movies We Dig, which I have been on a couple of times. It's a really fun show with a bunch of historians and archaeologists who break down movies featuring the ancient world. And it's really fun. It's mostly about kind of appreciation and understanding the reception of it. Um, but that's all to say, Movies We

• 3:41Liv Albert?

  Dig is going to be the second podcast, joining my new, um, collective slash podcast network. So more on this to come. I mentioned it a little bit on Tuesday, but Michaela and I are founding something called Nemasyne or The Memory Collective. And that is going to be a collective of people like us and like Christie and like the wonderful people behind Sweetbitter that I mentioned on Tuesday. People who are trying to look and, uh, share history with the public that is recognizing the impact that the patriarchal structure

• 4:22Liv Albert?

  has had on that history in varied ways. You can find more information at collectivemem.com. I couldn't get Memory Collective or Collective Memories. Collectivemem, M E M, dot com. I'll link in the episode's description. You can find more information about what we're doing, but we're starting with a kind of a podcast network, bringing in some people doing interesting stuff and who are indie and could use a podcast network. So we're working on that. Uh, Movies We Dig is one of those, but it's also this collective is based. In such similar ideas to what this episode is today that I wanted to make sure that I shared it all with you. We will be having more news as things come out. We are building

• 5:02Liv Albert?

  this from scratch with absolutely zero funding because the, anyway, there's no guaranteed money in the podcast right now. And so we are, we're figuring it out. It's going to be slow, but it's going to be really fucking good and really necessary and I ju- really necessary, really, really necessary. So today's episode just means a lot. It's a good introduction to Christie. We're going to be working together hopefully on a lot of other new things, hopefully more podcasts, because there's just, there's so much to say and I really want to be able to bring more of this information, more than I can do just on this show. So there's going

• 5:41Liv Albert?

  to be a lot more of that coming. And until then, please enjoy this gods, ancient history of medicine, Hippocratic medicine, women in medicine and stay tuned because next week we got another big one and it just got more interesting, more infuriating and more, I want to say empowering, but that's because I mean empowering today because rage is a good fuel, particularly when you're fighting fascism.

• 6:30Liv Albert?

  Conversations Othering Women in the History of Western Medicine with Dr. Kristy Vogler, Part One.

• 6:53Liv Albert?

  Hello. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, for the first time recording an introduction in front of a guest.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Woo.

• 7:02Liv Albert?

  Because, yeah, woo is right, because it's a guest that I can inflict this upon. Thank you. I am here with Christie Vogler, returning, returning to talk, all things. Now I'm going to be like, should I just say medicine? I just want to, I'm excited.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, that's kind of where we're at is we're, we're talking medicine. We're talking Hippocratic medicine.

• 7:24Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah. And so to the listeners, Christy was on the show years ago now, I think. I think it might have been two or three. Time is so weird. Talking about women in medicine and, and specifically Medica and like that kind of line between witchcraft and medicine purely because ladies are involved. But then, you know, you and offline, you and I were talking about so many more things that maybe one day we'll talk about more publicly. But in the meantime, you have so much more. And then you wrote a 20-page outline because you're awesome and have a very different brain than mine. And I'm excited to talk to you about it.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I listened to the, our original conversation and I think you kept it in there. It's like I mentioned scrolling through a 15-page outline last time and I, yeah, I like outlines.

• 8:15Liv Albert?

  I love it. I have like this brain that wants to love outlines, but I also let they, I cannot. And also, I love that in your email, you were like, you don't have to look at this. You could keep it a surprise. And I'm like, I appreciate that because it allows me to not feel like I've failed.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's, it's purely for me because I like having a game plan and then I like ignoring my game plan. But if I need to get back on track, there's the game plan.

• 8:38Liv Albert?

  It's there.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:40Liv Albert?

  I love that. Well, it worked out great for the live recording that we did with Movies We Dig, your other podcast, just to promote it right in there.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:47Liv Albert?

  So you're at one.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that was my first big planning project for podcasts and involved, what, six of us?

• 8:56Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  All at once?

• 8:57Liv Albert?

  Huge.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:59Liv Albert?

  It was so fun.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, yeah, we're, we're planning to do it again, either soon or definitely for International Podcast Day again, because.

• 9:11Liv Albert?

  It's a good excuse.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  There's a holiday.

• 9:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's a good excuse to really work towards it. So yeah. Well, I'm excited for that whenever it does happen. And in the meantime, I, I mean Hippocratic medicine. So are you looking at Greece? Like, I don't know where to begin. Also, like, obviously, I want to focus on Greece, but I know you typically focus more on Rome. So like.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:30Liv Albert?

  What's happening?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Okay. So last time we spoke, and I was talking about the intersection of magic and medicine.

• 9:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's the title. Thank you for remembering it and name dropping it right here.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to hold it out. And what I was kind of talking about that was the medical pluralism that exists in the ancient world. And yes, my research really focuses on the Roman Empire in terms of like the site I dug at and the, the artifacts I specifically was looking at. But as an archaeologist, we love this thing called context. And so to understand, you know, female medical practices, you have to study everything from like, okay, what is midwifery? What are actually magicians? What is the Hippocratic corpus? And, um, you know, where do people fit into all of these different ideas that exist in the ancient world?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And strangely enough, Hippocrates and his supposed writings is, is what has, you know, it's really scary to think about because we call Hippocrates the father of medicine and sometimes modern medicine. And if you think about that,

• 10:45Speaker 02

  he was writing, what, late fifth, early fourth century supposedly? And our medicine did not change for over 2,000 years.

• 10:54Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  The same kinds of treatments they, um, that Hippocrates was using is the same treatments that were used in the civil war and they were called heroic, uh, treatments. That was like bloodletting and things like that.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  And we literally just, Western medicine did not really change until we discovered germs.

• 11:19Liv Albert?

  I learn these things and I'm like, I wish I was surprised. But the West is just such, they had such a hard on for ancient Greece. They were like, these people invented everything. It's like, just on its face, so silly to think that there should, that like, we can't evolve past. It's how I feel, this is maybe taking it too dark, but it's how I feel about the, what we call democracy. People love to get mad at me for saying this. Like, I don't, I'm not saying that the rule of the people is bad. I'm saying that the form of democracy that the ancient Greeks invented was not actually the rule of the people and it's problematic. And this idea that in 2,500 years, we've decided that there is nothing better than this one thing invented 2,500 years ago, is fucking wild to me. And it sounds like that with the medicine, like this idea that like,

• 12:03Liv Albert?

  they knew all, we don't need to research, we don't need to go any further. Let's just cut them open and hope for the best.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yes. And like, oh, man. Okay. So, you know, in some ways, it's, I'm going to present kind of a simplified version because there's, there's so much involved and it's,

• 12:23Speaker 02

  on the other hand,

• 12:27Speaker 02

  I got lost in my own thoughts there.

• 12:29Liv Albert?

  I get it.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  On the other hand, it's, it's, a lot of these ideas still make sense to us, like a lot, so like Galen, you know, who kind of codified what he thought was the most important parts of the Hippocratic Corpus. His whole approach to treating people is like, okay, first thing first, start with diet. Then start with regiment. Like, what's your daily exercise look like? Then maybe we try some medications and as a last resort, you go to surgery. And that kind of makes sense, right? Like, your approach to treating someone, you want to be less invasive, you want, you know, to deal with certain illness in a very-

• 13:11Liv Albert?

  Overall, like health overall versus, yeah, specifically, yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it's like, a lot of these approaches make sense in some ways, like some things haven't changed and, you know, some, some of it's really intuitive. I, I liked, I think Jane Draycott just- Kind of talked about how, you know, Roman children would have been raised with an understanding of like health and how to maintain health, right? When you're a little kid and your parents tell you not to eat that, what do they say? Cause it'll make you sick.

• 13:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  And, and so it's like, there are these ideas that are just, what have humans done for millennia to maintain health? And so it's like, on some level that makes sense.

• 13:54Liv Albert?

  Of course. Well, I think that's the problem is like when we don't pick out the separate, the other stuff, right? Cause it's, and that's what makes it, I feel like that's what gets dangerous is because when a large part of it is intuitive and obvious and like, yes, definitely all of this is right. And then it's like, but then we have this like blockage. So it's like, well, then everything must be right. Like leeches.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yep. Yes. And we'll get into like some of the issues that the medical corpus has created about our intuitive sense of things, especially when it comes to women's bodies, because

• 14:27Speaker 02

  basically, a- again, very simplified and we'll get into it.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Hippocratic medicine is mostly based on the premise that the body that you're dealing with is the ideal, normal, air quotes, male body.

• 14:44Liv Albert?

  Naturally.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. The moment you switch to a woman, well, it's already defective because it has a thing called the uterus. And the uterus does this really, really scary thing where it bleeds once a month and the woman doesn't die. What is with that? Right?

• 15:03Liv Albert?

  And so it's wrong, obviously. The bodies are not the norm.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. So when you're, this entire corpus, this longstanding history of Western medicine is kind of really built for one size fits all.

• 15:20Liv Albert?

  That part hasn't changed.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  It has not changed.

• 15:22Liv Albert?

  I think there's some parts that are working on it now, but like.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:27Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like I.

• 15:29Liv Albert?

  Did you ever, sorry, just to, because this is like a modern thing I think about all the time now is like, how like every type of medication or every type, like literally anything, you know, they'll, there's so many things that they'll say, like, do not use if you're pregnant. And it's not because they know it would harm you or the baby. It's because they just don't test on pregnant people like ever. So it's just like, just don't, not because it's actually a problem, but simply because we don't care to check.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yep. Yes. And the, you know, kind of a later problem that stemmed from is like, women weren't tested in a lot of things for a long time, like even if they weren't pregnant, because scientists would rather presume like, but what if you were, or what if this affects your ability to get pregnant? Therefore, we're just not going to test on women.

• 16:19Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, because the womb as the growth mechanism is really all they care about. They don't actually care about the human body. Oh, I wonder what we're talking about. That's fine. It's everything's bad. But like, yeah, it's just so wild because truly it is this constant reminder throughout all of history and up until right this very moment, that like, the really only concern for the, the female body, and I say that like, people with the uterus, like the concern is simply that they can create more men. It's not that they are a body being lived in by a human being equal to a man. It's that they, we need to be concerned with whether or not they are capable of creating more men.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And I, yes, that is what this conversation is going to be about, for sure. But I also wanted to kind of think back on, so I, last time I talked to you, I brought up like three different passages. One was. The story of Aeneas getting healed by his mother Venus, but also the surgeon Iapix, who's, you know, performing surgery on him. And another one is the story of Agnadeki, who all of these women were dying during childbirth. So she disguised herself as a man and got training and she started saving the lives of women. And I, what I liked about both those stories is that the reason Iapix became a healer is

• 17:47Speaker 02

  he wanted to take care of his elderly father. The reason Agnadeki went through this huge deception and training and facing the court was she wanted to save the lives of the woman in her community. And like, that's an atheological story. We don't think that's historical fact anymore than we think. Venus carrying her son Aeneas is historical fact, but what those stories show, and I think why medicine is so important, is that the people who are in medicine, I think a lot of them do it because they do. They want to take care of the people in their lives and their community. And what's hard is that in order to legitimize and push the knowledge and advancement of

• 18:31Speaker 02

  those individuals to save people's lives, is you have to create this institution. And this institution has very different goals than what the individuals within it might have. And so it's like, I do want to posit that because I know from last time, it's like, we definitely had like nurse practitioners and other people involved in healthcare. Um, you know, they're part of the system. And I think that's, we have a love hate relationship with healthcare. And I, I do want to just point out that like the individuals involved, there are people who actually care and want to use all of this history and all of this knowledge to help people, which is, I think, important to appreciate.

• 19:12Liv Albert?

  Absolutely. No, that's, yeah, thank you for saying that. Cause it's hard, you get caught up in the system. Cause the system is so oppressive that it is easy to get stuck in that versus thinking of, yeah, these individual people who actually are just out to do good. And unfortunately, sometimes the system is stopping them or or preventing them or just like manipulating the way that we are seeing that we understand what is, you know, help. But it is, yeah, the primarily the system.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:41Liv Albert?

  And that's like, it's funny to talk about that, like, I'm sure far worse for you as an American, but it's funny to talk about this system as like this system, the overarching system itself. And like, you know, we're not even getting into like the actual individual like system in terms of how it hurts people that even just like the the broader idea of learning about healthcare and the, the, yeah, the, the evolution of it or or lack thereof over the last 2,000 years.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, that's kind of where my research was coming from and what helps me feel a little bit more grounded in it because it's like I'm working from the assumption that, okay, here is likely a woman at this villa in Gangevekio who appears to be practicing medicine. What does that look like? What are all of these things happening around her that are impacting the way that she is interacting with her patients? And, you know, so I started at the very individual level and then I got, and then you go into everything that is around that. And that's when it gets, I don't know, I felt like I was holding my breath for a moment. It's like, we have to dive in to so much craziness.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And it feels sometimes like where to begin.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  And I, I think that's kind of what I realized from our last episode. I panicked, actually, because it's like I've given two more presentations, an invited lecture, and I've taught a history of medicine course twice since the last time I talked to you. And it's like, surely I have new things to say. And then I read this in the episode, I'm like, oh, no.

• 21:15Liv Albert?

  I feel like I said so much.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  I forget that, like, you know, conference presentations are 15, 20 minutes in length, and we talked for like an hour.

• 21:26Liv Albert?

  It's so funny for me to hear that because like I don't do any of that side of it. I just love these conversations and I can get these experts to talk for so long, but I've never thought about it like that I'm also like exhausting knowledge in certain ways.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was just, I was like panicked, like, oh no, what will I do? Do I have anything new to say about Medica? And I'm like, okay, yes, yes, I do. But I also realized that, you know, when we were talking about rational medicine, biomedicine, I didn't really get into what is Hippocratic medicine? And, you know, why? We, we did talk about how like women who practice more folk medicine, like how they're kind of being stigmatized as a competition, as something opposite of that. But then what I'm looking at is, is women who decide they want to enter into that system and practice medicine in that manner. And I'm really curious, why? Why not just be a MAI?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Why not just be a healer, um, wise woman or something like that? Why choose this path? Um, and so I, I, that, that was kind of the question I was coming from. It's like, okay, we got to talk about Hippocrates. We got to think about why do these women decide to enter the, uh, a realm of medicine that has eventually been gendered male? And then the other big question, and this is what I had been covering mostly is, who's listening to that woman? Like, what authority as a physician does she have to tell a patient, you need to do this? And, you know, if you think about that, that's really interesting because

• 23:04Speaker 02

  a lot of these individuals are with women, for one thing. A lot of them are of former slave status or slaves themselves. And so who does that Medica get to treat? How seriously will that patient take her? Because the other kind of interesting thing to talk about is as a patient, you have a lot of agency. You don't have to listen to a doctor and follow their directions. You do get to choose if you're going to take your aunts. Uh, recipe over some, some guy trained in Alexandria, right? And I thought that was a really interesting question, too, is like this role has a certain

• 23:46Speaker 02

  level of authority to it, um, which I think is also appealing to women in, in ways that like a service job of like doing hair or, um, you know, weaving or something, you don't have that kind of authority over another person. So that was kind of a, a, one of the other ideas I was, I've been exploring more recently. So all that to say is like, that's, that's what we're going to try and cover today. And I'm sure it'll be a winding path, but.

• 24:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, I mean, I love all of that. I'm trying to decide like where, I mean, you have your outline too, which is great because I just want to hear everything. But yeah, why don't we start with like a little bit on this Hippocrates guy? Because I'll admit that my knowledge of him is pretty highly based on Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which means it's not great, but also, you know, could be worse.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  It could be worse. That's, that's, I forgot Hippocrates is in that game.

• 24:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's a bunch, a bunch of little quests with him.

• 24:42Liv Albert?

  Hippocrates.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  You know, okay, so yeah, let's talk about Hippocrates of Coss, born circa four sixty BCE and died around three seventy-five BCE.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  As I mentioned, so unless you play Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the only other time most people have heard about Hippocrates is the Hippocratic oath.

• 25:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Because it's something that doctors still take today. They take a, a different version of it, but, um, that's, that's usually how they know this guy. And as I mentioned, he is often referred to as the father of medicine or modern medicine.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, we barely know anything about him. Like he is almost on the level of Homer in my mind, except we have like some contemporaries who talk about him. So it's like, we know he was probably a real person.

• 25:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Like Socrates is what I'm imagining.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yes, very much so.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  And the funny thing is, is like, even though his name is on the oath. It is very unlikely he actually wrote the oath because what made him interesting is that he started teaching people how about medicine for for payment. And the reason like that's a big deal is because usually you kept that knowledge within the family. So the oath actually has a prohibition against teaching people medicine for payment because that means you're basically sharing this knowledge outside of the family.

• 26:07Liv Albert?

  That's ironic today.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah, it's a whole different thing. And yet, you know, you've got families of doctors too. Like it is a weird, a weird thing. But yeah, so it we know very clearly that Hippocrates you know, didn't follow at least one of the tenants of the oath that he is supposedly had authored.

• 26:28Liv Albert?

  That's funny.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, yeah. So what we do know, again, he originates from Kos, which is a Greek island, part of the Dodecanese, which is in southeast Aegean Sea, near modern day Turkey. And then we do have a group of letters and speeches dating to around 350 BCE, which depict him as a wise sage, a patriot who refused to take Persian gold and serve their king, and a wonderfully versatile doctor capable of treating both a monarch's love sickness and the great plague of Athens, which I don't know if he cured the plague of Athens.

• 27:03Liv Albert?

  In the Thousand's Creed Odyssey, he helped and so did Cassandra.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  That's fair. That's fair. Okay, it's canon.

• 27:10Liv Albert?

  Great, great. Literally, and by helped, I mean, you go and you like, just have to throw a bunch of bodies on the fire because Hippocrates tells you to. But still.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, oh, my gosh. Yeah. So

• 27:23Liv Albert?

  Do we have his writings? Or just to like, maybe guide along?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  So you're going back to Socrates in that case, right? We don't know of what we call the Hippocratic Corpus. We don't know of like, if he authored any of it, if his students authored it, or if people just using the name because it became popular with medicine authored it. And yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Let's see, I think he's also mentioned Plato actually talks about him and we learned from Plato that Hippocrates was an Asclepiad, meaning he was supposedly descended from Asclepius, which also legitimizes his role as a healer.

• 27:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  And he's, he's one of the ones that tells us that he's teaching medicine for money. So, um, so again, it's like-

• 28:05Liv Albert?

  Plato causes so much trouble about figuring out what is an actual ancient fact and what is just like him making shit up.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, what's really interesting is, uh, we, it is likely that Hippocrates or the writings of Hippocrates and his students was popularly known in Athens because, um, there's this great article, I, I forget who wrote it, I'll have to come back to that.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  There are plays where a character goes mad, so Euripides Heracles. And if you listen to the description, I have to find it. If you listen to the description of what this madness supposedly looks like, it is very similar to descriptions from, uh, On the Sacred Disease, which is about epilepsy, of what symptoms of epilepsy look like. So, um, there is a line in Euripides, uh, Heracles where madness is talking to Iris, the messenger goddess. And she says, behold him, see how even now he is wildly tossing his head at the outset, rolling his eyes fiercely from side to side without a word, nor can he control his panting

• 29:18Speaker 02

  breath like a fearful bull in act to charge. He bellows, calling on the goddess of nether hell.

• 29:25Liv Albert?

  I love Euripides so much. I haven't covered that play, but it's, I need to.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  And so like, it's been pointed out, it's like this language shows that like these playwrights are reading or aware of Hippocratic texts because they're using that as inspiration, uh, in their plays as descriptors. So it definitely seems that like, it's not just Plato, it's like other people are aware that this corpus exists and they're engaging with it in some manner.

• 29:53Liv Albert?

  That's really interesting. I bet you there's stuff in Orestes too, that would kind of have similar-

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a few different examples. Yeah.

• 30:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Liv Albert?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. You know the ones. I've been raving about them for ages. But now is the time of year when you might consider gifting Quince to the people in your life. There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet that you love and you know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. So this holiday season, think Quince. Quince, you know, makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim, the kind of pieces you'd be just as happy gifting as you would be to unwrap. You all know I love all of the stuff I have from Quince. I'm actually traveling in Greece

• 30:56Liv Albert?

  right now and I have my go-to woven leather bag. I seriously use it everywhere. That's why it's with me here. It's beautiful and it's practical and it's from Quince. And I actually have a parcel to pick up when I get back home, which has some goodies in there. I got this pair of corduroy high-rise pants. I'm really excited to try those out as soon as I get home. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the

• 31:36Liv Albert?

  Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Let's Talk About Myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  Love the crown molding.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 32:24Speaker 05

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  So I thought that was just a cool... And I had sent you earlier, I sent you clips, right?

• 33:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Of different TV shows, domina and HBO's Rome, that are very much taking like, oh, here is how medicine is described. We're going to play it out in our show for entertainment and for drama and...

• 33:39Liv Albert?

  I only watched half of the one from HBO's Rome because I went, ugh.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  I know, sorry.

• 33:45Liv Albert?

  That's okay. Okay, I get the point.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  That one's great for two reasons. One, it illustrates how public treatment was.

• 33:56Liv Albert?

  To the listeners, which I can link to it too, but basically, one of the characters in Rome, Titus Pullo, everyone's favorite, is getting essentially brain surgery in someone's house in front of a crowd.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:09Liv Albert?

  While he's awake. The most you need to know. Well.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, you know, it kind of highlights this point that like doctors are craftspeople. They're not, you know, for the most part, they're not elites and they have a business to run. So they perform in front of an audience.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Which I love that aspect. And then as towards the end of the clip, when the doctor is leaving and he's explaining directions of like, you know, expect this and this and this. And then he turns and goes, oh, maybe sacrifice a white rabbit to this deity. That that helps sometimes. And I love that because it's a great example of like, you know, the doctors are supposedly being all rational. It's like, but if it makes you feel better.

• 34:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like just in case.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:54Liv Albert?

  Couldn't hurt.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Cover your bases.

• 34:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  And I love it because it's such a great example of, yeah, patients would feel very reassured if a doctor is like, okay, do this and this and this. But also, you know, talk to the gods, see what they can do for you.

• 35:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, it reminds me of like, I mean, the, you know, that this is, I mean, maybe it's still connected in ways I don't know. But, you know, just going back to Hippocrates as like a child of Asclepius or or a relation of Asclepius, you know, like before they had, you know, that that side of early medicine, they were relying on the gods and relying on Asclepius. And there's all these incredible pieces from Asclepius and temples where people would leave like dedications in thanks or in prayer for healing of like their different body parts and stuff. And so I imagine like,

• 35:50Liv Albert?

  you know, for a long time with this transition to medicine in any kind of form, like you're still dealing with people who are very tied to their deities, who trust their deities. And like, you need that kind of balance, even if it's just for that. You know, almost the, what's the word I want of like placebo effect, right? Of like going for, yeah, that that that aspect that gives you comfort culturally. And and that makes a big difference. Difference.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's it's really interesting. That's like a what could arguably be a major shift with Hippocratic medicine is the idea of like illness has some kind of rational explanation. It's not caused by supernatural things like the gods. So like if you were going based just on the corpus, you would think that like they like the healing cults and these other protective amulets and things like that. You think doctors would just totally be like eh, ignore all of that. No, they are actually partnering with with these healing cults to legitimize their own practice because we

• 36:56Speaker 02

  we see things like dedications of plaques or surgeons' tools or things like that from doctors to Asclepius. We also know that later in the Roman period, they they form these things called collegia, which are like fraternities or clubs for different professions. And one of the things that the doctors collegia does is they apparently, and I don't know what this looks like, hold a contest of doctoring during the festival of Asclepius. And I'm like, what does that look like? Like you get a bunch of people that need stitches and you see like who does the best?

• 37:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's both fascinating and terrifying to imagine. Like, I feel like it could go many ways. Yeah, I like that. Well, I mean, it's, yeah, just to relate it to modernity, like, people don't take that well to in particularly intellectual people coming in and saying, you need to do this thing because of all of these science reasons, like get vaccinated, you know, like there's still this, there's people don't like to have their knowledge questioned or challenged or what they believe already. They don't want to have that challenge.

• 38:14Liv Albert?

  So it's really smart as these early, you know, workers, like, I mean, I'm sure it's also just happening, happening very naturally because this is just coming about culturally, but like to be still so aligned with the gods.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:28Liv Albert?

  Was a good idea for lots of reasons, like in terms of just, yeah, making their point come across.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, again, going back to this question of authority, it's like, why would you listen to a physician versus a priest? For instance, um, again, the partnering, partnering with the healing cults of Asclepius makes a lot of sense because do, do you know when those cults become very popular in Greece and then later in Rome? Like what major event prompts it?

• 38:55Liv Albert?

  Um, well, later in Rome, I mean, I would have assumed the Peloponnesian War, but maybe not.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not wars. We were talking about earlier plague. So the plague of Athens.

• 39:05Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the plague of Athens. And then later, I think about a century later, Rome starts to experience, uh, experiences a plague that lasts about three years. And so they consult the Sibyl and books and they're like, dude, bring this Asclepius over. So introducing the cult of Asclepius becomes a state action and has official recognition versus there is no law or certification or anything for doctors. You can just claim that title.

• 39:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Liv Albert?

  But when they really need help, they're going to bring the cult over from another culture that they've conquered and colonized. They're going to just bring it over and be like, well, this is magic cult. We'll be fine.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And the doctors come with them because they figure it's like, oh, the state recognizes this. So if we show we are associated with this, then people will pay for our services.

• 40:04Liv Albert?

  And did a lot of Greek doctors come along with the cult of Asclepius then?

• 40:09Speaker 02

  We see a huge, like, for Romans, Greek medicine, medicine is foreign. And there's actually, that's why there's kind of, there's an anti-Hellenism movement in Rome. Because they don't like all of these ideas coming from the East, from the Greeks. And one of the big ones is medicine.

• 40:30Liv Albert?

  Doesn't it?

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and you get people like Pliny and Cato writing about how like, doctors are shifty. They'll poison you and sleep with your wife.

• 40:44Liv Albert?

  Of course, they go to sleep with your wife. Do you not have any other concerns? Honestly, get your house in order.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  And so you shouldn't trust them. You should do your own doctoring is basically like the the instructions given by, you know, that's kind of the early reaction to something that is foreign, but also think about like, what kind of people are being brought into Rome? Slaves, slaves with medical knowledge. Why would you listen to them? Why would you trust them?

• 41:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's, you know, I love this job. I love these conversations. I love connecting it to the modern time because I think it's really important. But, sorry, I forget exists. Um, but I just like, I, it's so exhausting. It's so exhausting seeing dumb shit from 2,000 years ago just be repeated now because Western, and I'm going to say that because I, I mean, ultimately, I just mean the type of Western people that consider themselves so fucking descendant from things like Greece and Rome that they're like,

• 41:58Liv Albert?

  just so unable to see the value in foreign people. Like it reminds me of like all of the immigrants from India who are full blown doctors, but like they come to North America because they want to, and they like, like legit can't be doctors here. And you're like, these people are doctors. We could have more doctors, like Canada may have free healthcare. They, Americans love to, you know, brag or compare themselves, but we have no healthcare. Like we, it's free. Sure. If you're in an accident, you won't die, but there is so few doctors. And there's so little access to care that like, if you have cancer, you're probably still fucked. You won't go bankrupt, but you might not live either. And it's like, there's just so many doctors, but we have this utter fear of foreign or like Eastern medicine and how like

• 42:42Liv Albert?

  Chinese medicine is like fucking great. And they've been doing it a really long time. And, you know, but like the West is still so like, anyway, I also grew up in a crazy hippie household. So that's coming through here. It's just, yeah, it's wild to me to, I mean, I'm not surprised at all, but why can't we just like foreigners when they bring really great and valuable things? Why do we have to be scared of them? Cause they're brown. I don't understand.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Well, especially considering the Romans. Force them to come over half the time too.

• 43:11Liv Albert?

  Well, and then there's another country that did that too. We might call it, um, yeah, that's the thing. Well, that, but that's colonialism, right? Like,

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:18Liv Albert?

  I had this conversation with somebody else that's going to air probably around this time, but we're talking about the colonization broadly and like, yeah, I mean, what the, the, the utter irrationality of colonizing countries like specifically Rome and Britain and America, I will say, cause I, Greece did not do this to the same degree. But like those specific colonizing countries and how they just sought to take over land that wasn't theirs, to steal it, to imprison, to impoverish, to destroy the lives of the people living there. And then when those people who were colonized and forced to become part of the empire, when those people then went to the, the like center of the empire, suddenly they're fucking hated

• 44:03Liv Albert?

  and racism becomes what it is. And it's like, it, it, it's so lacking in rationale, which like all of, you know, obviously that's the issue with

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:14Liv Albert?

  understanding it is that like it is just evil. Um, and so you, i- i- if you're coming at it with like empathy and irrational mind, you can't understand it. But like, it's just so fucking wild. Like Rome enslaves all of these people and then has the nerve to be afraid of the fact that they have fucking skills from before they were enslaved by the empire. And it's like, you know, that, that country over in that place, you know, settles and colonizes land that was inhabited by other people for 2,000 plus fucking, well, 5,000 years. And then they're like, oh my God, these people keep, you know, keep getting angry at us for taking all of their land

• 44:54Liv Albert?

  and stealing their houses and they keep attacking us for, for, I can't imagine why. We're now we're just surrounded by enemies and oh my gosh, what are we going to do? And it's like, well, if you hadn't killed everyone and stolen their land, you wouldn't be surrounded by enemies. But we're not going to say it like that. Like, nope.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 45:14Liv Albert?

  Um, back to Rome and being mad that their enslaved people were good at stuff.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:23Liv Albert?

  Decompress a little. They don't know how to have, they don't know how to have conversations anymore. I don't know how to do it. Everyone, this is being recorded on Friday, January 24th for context. Thanks.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Well, and trust me, it's just gonna get worse because I haven't even gotten to the women part.

• 45:37Liv Albert?

  Sick.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 45:41Liv Albert?

  So, um, yeah. Sorry, I really like went off. I probably won't.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  No, it's okay. No, it's like, like, yeah. I, when I got to the end of my outline, I was so mad and we, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll get to that. We'll get to it. Um, okay. So when we, we talk about this guy Hippocrates and the Hippocratic oath and supposedly saving or ending the plague of Athens, or whatever he's doing in Assassin's Creed. Um, usually what we're really referring to is this corpus that I've mentioned a couple of times, which again, we're not really sure who authored. Um, it's unclear if any of the treatises in the Hippocratic corpus were the work of Hippocrates, students, or just others using the name, because I think we talked about that last time. Sometimes you pick a name. So people will listen to you. And I think we, I use the example of like supposedly there's a cosmetics manual written by Cleopatra.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Yes, that Cleopatra.

• 46:34Liv Albert?

  Naturally.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  And there's another really interesting example. There's a rare text supposedly authored by a woman and her name's Metodora. And it's titled, On the Conditions of the Womb. It's a late antiquity work to the like, it's dated around the first to sixth century CE. So it's definitely after Hippocrates.

• 46:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  And it's based on gynecological concerns. Um, but it draws heavily on the Hippocratic corpus, which I've hinted at like, why Hippocratic medicine's not great when it comes to women. So you have this woman writing a text that is basically just relaying very similar information to like earlier Hippocratic medicine.

• 47:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Um, it's the only medical text attributed to a woman authored to survive from the Greco-Roman antiquity. Uh, but do you know what the name Metodora means?

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Dora, Dora's in there. That might help.

• 47:27Liv Albert?

  I, I know. It's when I should. No, I'm not gonna get it.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  It's okay. It's a, it means gifts of the uterus.

• 47:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Gifts of the uterus. Okay, that reminds me that there is, I mean, one that immediately reminds me of the like, quote unquote, husband of Sappho, whose name is just like man from Man Island or Dick from Man Island, something like that. Um, and it's like, yeah, oh, we're supposed to believe that's real. Sure. I'm sure she killed herself over a guy named Dick from Man Island. Um, but aside from that completely, and just like for a silly thing that's so similar, there is um, uh, an ancient Greek sex manual that is attributed to have been written by like a servant girl of Helen. Because like, it's the same thing of like, just giving, yeah, oh, who was gonna be the most sexually promiscuous woman in ancient Greece? Well, it would be Helen.

• 48:17Liv Albert?

  So obviously, one of her, one of her women wrote it, like.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Obviously, yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  You know, there's actually a huge argument over is Metadora a woman or not a woman? And it's like, it's pretty obvious the name's probably a moniker. But you know, there've been studies done on names and how certain names like somehow drive people into certain professions that relate to it. So it's like, there's some psychology there, but more likely than not, like someone adopted the name to further legitimize the information being written down.

• 48:55Liv Albert?

  As someone whose name, like, original given name is Alexandra Oliver and ended up in this profession, I don't know. I don't think that there's any connection to that at all.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 49:08Liv Albert?

  For this white girl in Canada whose parents gave her a bizarrely Greek name.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Well, and mine's like, I was born five days before Christmas. And like, so my name is Christie. It's like, I don't feel super Christian most of the time. And then I later learned that like, Christie, it means, it's Greek for the anointed one. And I joke, it's like the oiled up one, just for fun.

• 49:32Liv Albert?

  Hell, yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  And I'm like, maybe, maybe, maybe there's something to it. Who knows?

• 49:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, and even if it's just that you can find those connections later, like, that's fun, too, which is what I think is real with mine. Like, it's, you know, but I love it.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, so, yeah, the, the, the claiming of the name Hippocrates probably was some dude practicing medicine back in the day, but like, he just kind of became the authoritative name you throw on, on texts, medical texts, so that they get accepted. And it's pretty interesting. So I wanted to mention, I talked a lot about Vivian Newton last time, who wrote an entire book on ancient medicine, and I referred to Vivian as a she. He is not. He is a lovely elderly British man with a very feminine name here in the United States. I, I got to see him give a talk.

• 50:28Liv Albert?

  British names sometimes.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  So I'm correcting the record on the first episode to share, show how we grow and learn over time.

• 50:39Liv Albert?

  Love it. Love it. Also, like, North America, I get it. There's like, there's an awful lot of Evelyns in the UK that are men, and I go, okay, no, I'm just, I'm gonna get used to that. I get it.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Leslie, I know, is another one that like, yeah. So, um, anyway, according to Newton, Hippocratic Corpus is, it's made up, it's about 60 works, written in the Ionic dialect of Greek, and it's, it, the collection we have today only dates back, like, have physical copies of dates back to 1526, when the Aldine Press in Venice printed the first edition of the complete works in Greek. And it's clear from the manuscripts that a great majority of the texts printed in that year had already been circulating together under the name of Hippocrates, possibly as early as the first century CE, if not 300 years

• 51:31Speaker 02

  earlier, when Hippocrates was roaming the world or so. And what's interesting is like, it is kind of a confusing collection, because it seems that it was assembled at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Um, which makes sense because the island of Kos was part of the Ptolemaic Empire at that time. So that's part of the reason we still have the Hippocratic Corpus is it was preserved at the Library of Alexandria. The other reason that we have all of this information about Hippocrates is because a lot of Greek medicine was adopted and preserved and copied by later medieval Islamic civilization.

• 52:14Liv Albert?

  This is something I want to find a way to talk about in like a whole fucking episode is the way that the Muslims preserved like an enormous amount of what we have from Greece and Rome was preserved because of Islam and we love to forget that in the West.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Same as Homer. Like we, we would not have Homer if, if not for that. So.

• 52:36Liv Albert?

  That's good to know. Thank you. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  So yeah, part of my history of medicine course, we do spend a, a long time looking at um, how Islamic medicine built upon uh, the work, like what the Greeks and Romans had done with it and preserved so much of what we still have today. They're also why we still have Homeric med- or not Homeric, uh, Hippocratic medicine until we discover germs in the late 1800s. So.

• 53:05Liv Albert?

  You know, they can't be all good.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  It, it's really interesting though, because like there are case studies where um, the physicians uh, in the medieval period will write about how like supposedly the Greeks and the Romans could do this thing, like a tracheotomy. I don't know how. I don't think, uh, because they forget they lose the practical knowledge of doing some of the procedures and everything. Um, and so there, there is this guy who was just, it's like, and then it's kind of a tragic story. It, a, a young woman had tried to uh, unalive herself using a knife and she did it in such a way that allowed this physician to conveniently test a tracheotomy out. And he's like, it is possible. And that's all we get of her story.

• 53:50Liv Albert?

  Oh my God.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So interesting case studies like that.

• 53:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  It it it is. And it's it's interesting because you why just focusing on Hippocratic writings is so problematic is because medicine is a practical skill.

• 54:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  It's not just theory, it is practice as well. And so you can preserve the theory all you want. It's how you put it into practice that can that matters more over time. So.

• 54:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. To get into, so, you know, I know you, there's so much about to talk about when it comes to, I mean, medicine broadly and women specifically. But like, so you, you know, you hinted at it with the Hippocrates that just on its face, women were just like not men. Is that kind of like, yeah, like, so, yeah, what like what was kind of going on? They just were sort of not studied or just like assumed to be this like, yeah, incorrect form of a man or what? How so? How does that work logically when you're like, well, which one came first, buddy? Anyway, sorry.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Yep. Nope. That's a great question. And I I have to drag Aristotle into it and natural philosophy because he, I don't like him. He very much complicates this idea.

• 55:15Liv Albert?

  Searching into Aristotle on women. And yeah, okay, now I'm ready for this.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So again, on the surface, all human bodies are basically the same. They have these things called humors. And they are hot, cold, dry, wet. And there's a balance of those within the body. But women have this really weird organ called the uterus. And if it falls out of balance, which it does all the time, because women go through this monthly, regular process of bleeding. That's not normal for men. So they're obviously sick all the time because of the uterus.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  And therefore, there, there is kind of this interesting question then of how do you, how would a doctor actually practically approach a female patient then? Do you operate on the base of all of these diagnoses that are the idea of the wandering womb? Like your womb has gone up your chest cavity and is sucking the blood out of your brain? And you're hysterical? Or?

• 56:23Liv Albert?

  Thinking back to my episode with, uh, uh, oh shit. Helen King, I'm gonna say it again. I'm thinking back to my episode with Helen King, which is women are wet and spongy. And yeah, uh, this, yeah, okay. Yep. So the uterus is going all over the place. What are they gonna do?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Or is the symptom a headache? And you just treat it like a headache like you would with a male patient? What makes more sense? And like, you know, that's kind of a big question because the Hippocratic corpus would be like, well, female illnesses all have to do with the uterus. And the cure for that, um, not great. The treatments for any complaint of the uterus, just not great for the most part. And well, I'll, I'll definitely get into more of that. Or do you go with the approach that in humoral pathology? It's like, oh, you have too much blood in the brain. And therefore we're going to give you a pharmaceutical treatment that reduces blood pressure or something like that.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Like something maybe actually reasonable and helpful. And I don't know that like it, the, that answer isn't always clear because a lot of the medical texts are focused on diagnosis. And a lot of ancient texts aren't necessarily concerned with case studies and the results.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  So we're told how to figure out what a problem is, but and how to treat it, but not how well that treatment works.

• 57:51Liv Albert?

  Right. Or whether that was the problem to begin with. Yeah. Okay.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:56Liv Albert?

  It reminds me of, we, I think we talked about this last time, not on, not on the podcast. I mean, because you and I just haven't had calls, but I think we both, did you see Dostoevsky? Or did you, were you?

• 58:06Speaker 02

  I have not, I need to, it's coming on streaming soon, so like.

• 58:09Liv Albert?

  So I just, there's a lot of moments that are done so well, where it's just like this woman, like, you know, is having all these health issues, and they're like, well, she's just, it's very clear she has too much blood. Just get rid of some of that. Like, and that's, you know, over half of the doctors, it's just, well, obviously she has too much blood. And it just made me laugh every time. And she's like, okay, yeah, no, sure. Yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm sure that's definitely it. And it's not just that you could have just learned a different body type. There's just happened to be two. In all, in all creatures, there are two sexes. And I'm saying, you know, not gender sex, like, and obviously there are still more than two, but like,

• 58:47Liv Albert?

  come on, guys, like this idea that women are just like broken versions of men, even when animals have, like, diversity of sexes, like, what are we doing?

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So, so, yeah, so just a refresher. Here, here is the basic, what does Hippocratic medicine put forth as the idea? So Hippocratic medicine does cover all aspects of health of the individual, including mind and body. So there, it's really interesting of looking about, um, you know, Galen and other people talking about stress. What is the impact of stress on the body? And, you know, some, what is kind of really nice about the healing cults of Asclepius is, I, I asked this of my students, it's like, why might you feel better going to Epidavros?

• 59:39Speaker 02

  You go there, you're out in the countryside, coast, out of a big city. There's a giant theater so that you can listen to music or like decompress and be entertained. There's walking, like, I wonder why people feel better when they go there. And those are like legitimate treatments in Hippocratic medicine as well. So that's really important. And I think I mentioned, it's like Hippocratic medicine, again, is like, they don't believe, according to the corpus, they don't believe in divine intervention. That doesn't happen in practice. But the idea is like, there is a rational, natural cause of illness. And as I mentioned before, it's like, treatment usually kind

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  of follows a particular order where you start with a change, like, you know, look at your diet and your regiment, then medication and the last, as a last resort, surgery, because, oh, boy, surgery does not.

• 1:00:35Liv Albert?

  It's a last resort now, so I can't imagine back then.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. They avoid chance charms and exorcisms because that falls under the realm of magic and folk medicine. Again, not necessarily happening in practice.

• 1:00:50Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Because it is useful to include some of those things in your practice for the comfort of your patients. And it might convince your patients to listen to you. If like, you're doing something that already.

• 1:01:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  They would have done.

• 1:01:05Liv Albert?

  That they feel is.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Okay, my doctor knows what he's talking about.

• 1:01:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I just like that connection to like, you gotta keep it, you gotta keep it up with the gods, because that's what people, that's the culture. That's like, the, that's the world.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  I, we still like, right? Like, if someone's sick, you, on social media, you'll, you'll see people like, ask for prayers or send prayers. Like, that's still something we practice.

• 1:01:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  As an active comfort.

• 1:01:33Liv Albert?

  My mother would say, send white light. Because again.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Liv Albert?

  I grew up in a very specific household.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. But it's still the same idea, right? Like, you, you leave room for the supernatural to do its thing. Because sometimes, maybe that's the, the little deciding factor at the end of the day. Who knows?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Let's see, this is where things get dicey. It claims a basis in empirical fact and sound practice that rejects limbsy philosophical hypotheses like Aristotle's explanation of conception and the difference between men and women. It doesn't do that. And we live with the consequences of that over time.

• 1:02:43Liv Albert?

  So, okay, so it says it rejects that, but in practice, not at all.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Correct, right?

• 1:02:50Liv Albert?

  Okay, can you remind me Aristotle on women and conception?

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Okay, so basically...

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Aristotle's the one who kind of comes up with the idea that... We also see this again in the Greek play of, oh, shoot, what is it? The Imanides? Is that the right one? When Orestes has to go and there's a trial and Athena's involved. And the Furies are basically arguing, it's like, hey, he killed his parent. It's a blood crime, therefore, we get to harass him. And Apollo shows up and makes the argument that women are just the vessels. They don't actually contribute any matter to the embryo. And therefore, because Clytemnestra was just a vessel and that Orestes was wholly...

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Is it Orestes? I think that's right. Wholly made up of Agamemnon goop.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  He is not guilty of a blood crime against for killing his mother. And

• 1:04:31Liv Albert?

  This could be video, just because I don't know what to say and I but my face is saying a lot.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Again, a good example of how like these different ideas are are showing up in our entertainment.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  And so another way that Aristotle puts it is that like women provide matter, like some kind of base. He actually talks about it as a cheese process. And that like the men's seed activates it and that's what actually gives it form into an infant. Um, there is some disparity. There are like some major differences, like Hippocratic medicine actually um leans more towards the idea that men and women in the womb are both pretty similar. And their natures can be really similar, but over time, like based on exposure, you might end up being more wet or more dry and that will impact on how manly you are.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Hippocratic medicine also, instead of Aristotle, kind of arguing that like women are just a vessel. Hippocratic medicine is of the idea that like men and women contribute something and they are like seeds. And depending on which seed overpowers the other one will give you a masculine woman or a wimpy guy and things like that. So a lot of interesting competitive ideas happening there.

• 1:06:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I just, yeah, okay. So they're telling men not to moisturize.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:06:10Liv Albert?

  I'm not asking for a real answer with that, don't worry. But it's what it sounds like. Be dry, guys. Dryness equals manly.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  And yeah, there's anyway. So again, even though the the writings is claiming one thing, in practice, this isn't necessarily happening. Um, what else have we got?

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Even so, many if not most doctors and their patients continue to leave a place for the gods with healing. We said that. Um, yeah. So leaving a place for the healing. If you actually read the original Hippocratic oath, it opens with, I swear by Apollo, the physician, and Asclepius, and Hesia, and Penesia, and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses, that according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this oath and this contract. So like, again, aligning themselves with this state institutionalized cults and cultural practices to legitimize themselves. Because again, there's no board certification doctors here. There's just-

• 1:07:14Liv Albert?

  Just swear into Apollo, the guy who says women are just a vessel.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. And so, um, this was kind of what I talked about in our last conversation is like, okay, so what was Hippocratic medicine doing? What were these physicians doing to legitimize their practice to get people to listen to them? Um, so again, aligned with Asclepius. Uh, in Rome, they also do another thing where there's a, a wide variety of medical practitioners participated in the Quinta Quattres, which was a festival to Minerva. And it included a procession around the city of different craftspeople. Um, so you would have doc- so that was one ways, like you would visually show yourself off by parading around the city as a doctor.

• 1:07:57Liv Albert?

  With your tools?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  With your tools, along with weavers, fullers, uh, dyers, teachers, painters and engravers. Like, that's just a fun party.

• 1:08:05Liv Albert?

  I like that they're all aligned in that way, like, along with, you know, kind of artists, yeah, and craftspeople.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's again, in Rome, why it becomes kind of like this weird

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  discipline, right? Because it does require knowledge. It does require, at least if you're practicing Hippocratic medicine, literacy, along with physical training and you're being paid for a service. So it's such a weird mix of intellectualism and-

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  That's what poor people do is work for a living.

• 1:08:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And eventually, like later, you do have what, you know, what they call armchair doctors. It's like, I just read all the medical texts, but I don't actually practice any. That's what kind of happens going into medieval period is like, you have these people who continue to copy and comment and, you know, develop new ideas on medicine, but all on paper. They don't actually go out and practice it on people. So.

• 1:09:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  It's all, it's always an interesting discipline in that way.

• 1:09:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's like researchers today, except that they do all of this practice, practical stuff. Alongside that, but it's like the same, it seems like the same idea where you're, you're not like a practicing physician, but you are, you know, advancing things. But today it's like, well, that also requires you to actually go get practical, like, knowledge, though, to not just the books.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. That's why medical school takes too so long.

• 1:09:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, there's a lot there.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  There's a lot to do, including learning a foreign language, Greek and Latin. You have to learn Greek and Latin to practice medicine.

• 1:09:51Liv Albert?

  It back then.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Today.

• 1:09:54Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Think about it. Think about how they talk about muscles.

• 1:09:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, right. But not like, yeah, yeah. No, true. Yeah, true.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So interestingly, body parts anatomy, Latin.

• 1:10:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Medications, Greek.

• 1:10:10Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love that. I, that's so interesting to me because I always find that my brain picks up on like etymological links now that I know, you know, little bits of, of Greek and Latin. And so I always love kind of piecing those together when it comes to like scientific terms and stuff, which tend to use them. But I didn't know that there is like an actual kind of like line between. What we use today.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so like what a lot of colleges will do is people who are on pre-med in order to get students more involved in humanities, what classics departments will do is offer a medical terminology course because they're going to have to learn all of these ancient terms in Greek and Latin. So that's a pretty common course offered by a lot of classics departments at like colleges and universities that are associated with like a medical school.

• 1:11:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I love that. That's fun. I mean, it's just such, yeah, I don't, maybe because I'm an enormous nerd for etymology, but still it's fun. Like I would take that. No science otherwise, but.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  When you starting to understand a Latin based, like, English is so useless sometimes. Understanding a Latin based language and learning Greek helps you comprehend so much more than just English will allow you to. And so that's a good reason to go learn dead languages, people. It's useful.

• 1:11:37Liv Albert?

  I mean, even the little, you know, like I don't, I've not had the chance to learn Greek and Latin, but I have a brain that I am fairly certain now is autistic and picks out all of those things and finds the, like, and I just like everything I see these days because of how, how much Greek and Latin I've taken in over this, this career that like, I swear like every word now, I'm like, oh my God, the edit, like I do this with plants, um, my friend all the time. And I'm just like, did you know that like, what was it? Oh, philodendron. I just came, I was like, oh, that just means friend of trees. And it just occurred to me the other day, looking into like a plant. I was like, I'm just looking to buy something. I'm like, oh, philodendron just means friend of trees. And I just love that what little Greek I know can allow me

• 1:12:21Liv Albert?

  to be like, oh, what a nerdy little thing I just learned.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hippopotamus, river horse. I love it.

• 1:12:29Liv Albert?

  Well, that's the best one. And that is why I maintain that the real river horses are the, uh, this is the dumbest, but that the, the horses that, uh, come when are when.

• 1:12:43Liv Albert?

  It's like a

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:12:45Liv Albert?

  Prayer in the Fellowship of the Ring whilst she is carrying Frodo on horseback and the Nazgul are nipping at their heels. And I won't pretend like I don't have that memorized, but I will not recite it here. But that Elvish spell pulls in the Riverhorses and those truly, that is, that's the true hippopotamus. Because actual hippopotami do not, and that is me realizing that I also do Greek plurals when English wouldn't make sense. But yeah, are nothing like Riverhorses, and I love that for them.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure.

• 1:13:21Liv Albert?

  So wait.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  If people do want to hear you say that spell, you said it on the episode you came and talked about Spartacus with us.

• 1:13:27Liv Albert?

  Did I?

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Liv Albert?

  Because I've made this same dumb joke? Oh, wow, I'm cool. That's terrible.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  I must have mentioned hippopotamus before, too. So like, we're both guilty of it.

• 1:13:41Liv Albert?

  It's so sad that I've done that before. Um, no, okay, but speaking of etymology, does that mean that Hippocrates means like, strong horse?

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  I think so. Right?

• 1:13:53Liv Albert?

  Great, great. Strength horse. Got it. And yeah, and Kratos. So, love it, love it for him. He's a strong horse.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then Isclepiad, and apparently like, anti Persian. Who knew?

• 1:14:08Liv Albert?

  Even at Kos, that feels like you're just, you're anti whoever, you know, it seems more appropriate at that time.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, like, that doesn't seem very doctor-like. No.

• 1:14:20Liv Albert?

  But it does seem very Greek.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  It does. It does, for sure. Yeah. Oh, okay. So, so that since the last time I spoke, I learned about another way that Hippocratic medicine was actively differentiating itself from

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Folk medicine and, and witchcraft. And so, so to get in that, humoral pathology, I've mentioned, it's like, it's these four humors, right? They kind of, for a long time, they only talked about three, because they're like, I don't, but they want four. They want four humors, because that is a better balance than three.

• 1:14:56Liv Albert?

  But Greek loved threes. That's a surprise to me.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  They did, but like, but then this whole like, hot, cold, wet, dry dichotomy, it really needs a fourth. And so, black bile, no one really knows what black bile is. Like, they're, they're just making shit up at that point.

• 1:15:14Liv Albert?

  This is where my English literature degree, like, melds with my classics degree in terms of Victorian wild shit.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe you know this then, because like, this was something I was amazed to learn. So, humoral pathology and these four things, and it's not just, so you've got, it's tied to the seasons. Later in medieval Islamic medicine, they tie it to like, particular constellations. And so, like, star readings were just as important to your health as like, anything else in this system.

• 1:15:49Liv Albert?

  Oh, the Zodiac girlies are loving that.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. And legit, like, those star charts matter. They, they obviously impact your health.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  So, this is, remains so prominent, that Carl Linnaeus, another father, father of taxonomy, used it to create a, this was just like infuriating to learn, to help taxonomize humans. That being, so he was saying in Systema Netura, that there are four species of humans-

• 1:16:31Liv Albert?

  There we go.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  -based on race.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Very much suggesting that-

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  They, humans are somehow different species. And if they interbreed with each other, then they just create more defective types of humans.

• 1:16:53Liv Albert?

  Oh, great. Oh, he's the father of eugenics, too.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  He is. He did contribute to it. Yeah, this, yep, you, you, you, you nailed it. It, uh, humoral pathology is used to help build ideas of eugenics. And racial science.

• 1:17:11Liv Albert?

  Oh, great. Measuring those skulls as we always should.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. And so, so humoral pathology then is these four humors and you are considered healthy when they're in balance in your body. Right? So if you get too much of one, or if one gets closed off and starts pooling around a body part, that's bad. And they also have their dichotomy, their opposites of each other. So if you were going to treat someone who, for instance, has a fever, you would use treatments that would cool the body. So like you take a bath, you eat cold foods. So it's this idea of you restore balance through the use of opposites. Ju- that's just the basic principle of it.

• 1:17:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And for a fever, that makes sense. And I imagine it's little else.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Again, it's like one of these things. It's like, okay, every once in a while.

• 1:18:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  They're doing things that make sense.

• 1:18:10Liv Albert?

  I mean, a stopped clock is wrong twice a day.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. Um, and there, there are other approaches. So like, there's a group of doctors called rationalists where they thought therapeutics were primarily based. The, so this is the rationalist approach. They're based on opposites, treatments that countered imbalances. Other approaches included empiricisms. They sound fun because they just do everything by trial and error.

• 1:18:37Liv Albert?

  Oh, good. That's what you want with medicine.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. And then there's methodists and they were just more of like, we're going to be gentle about how we treat people. So they're, they're the ones really promoting like walking and singing and rocking or swinging and a swing to like, feel better. And it's like, I feel like I really would have wanted to be looked at by a Methodist.

• 1:18:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Like I, it feels like. Risky in the long term, but so much nicer in the short term.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And so again, it's like humoral pathology didn't like practice in practice, like not everyone's doing the exact same thing. Not everyone's approaching medicine in the exact same way. But this idea of treatment by opposites versus folk medicine is based on this premise of homeopathy. And homeopathy is pretty closely tied to sympathetic magic. The idea that you deal with something like attracts like, so really famously like the evil eye.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Is as a protective charm for the evil eye. One, it's blue because there's this cultural assumption that people with blue eyes are more likely to cast an evil eye.

• 1:19:52Liv Albert?

  I didn't know that. I love that.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  So when you get a charm of it, it's it's usually blue. Like you can go to Greece or Turkey today.

• 1:20:01Liv Albert?

  I love it.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  And and it's fun because like, um, what the idea is like that charm would actually draw the evil eye to it. And there's some, you know, sometimes there's just like little small beads and stuff. So I've heard like Greeks talk about how like, if you lose the charm, that means that it no longer had the power to like take in the evil eye. So that's why you lose it. And so that's kind of how sympathetic sympathetic magic works. And we we see some of this idea, again, going back to Pliny and Cato. Because folk medicine in general, this it's based on this idea of homopathy. So the idea that like affects like a concept well recognized in discussions of sympathetic magic like the evil eye.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  But it's also talked about with menstrual blood. So I forget who it who does. I think it's Pliny. Talks about how like menstrual blood is super dangerous. It will like. Wilt crops, it will. I, I know there's someone who's like, talks about if like, another, if a pregnant woman comes in contact with it, it could jeopardize her pregnancy, it could render men impotent.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  But also, the cure for those things is menstrual blood and/or like something of like that has a similar nature to it. So, um, yeah, according to Ripe, it these are well chosen description. Oh, who said it? I have to find it. Uh, yeah, male writers like Pliny said, uh, menstrual blood is a monstrous thing and a great evil. Um, and it's because it was polluting and it could cause harm. Um, but to make sense of the apparently paradoxical nature of menstrual blood as both contagiously corrosive and healing, it's necessary to appreciate three independent ideas. And then you go back and say, this is Pauline Ripe's

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  article that I've pulled from before I've talked about. Uh, she wrote on Ro- Roman women, wise women and witches. And she's the one who's like, okay, we have all of these literary descriptions of witches. What could that actually tell us about the practice of folk medicine based on these literary descriptions? So, so this nature of menstrual blood or other things that witches are using to treat things. Um, the explanation of illness or harm comes from excessive flow or stagnation, both of which resulted in decay, withering or and wasting. That's not unlike some of the hemoral pathology ideas in terms of like, you can have too much of something, something's out of balance.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  But folk healing appears to have depended upon the idea of transference of illness and health bringing factors between bodies. So health as an absence of illness and you remove the impediments to health, then health remains. So like you kind of like the idea of like sucking poison out of or venom out of a bite. Um, that's kind of the same idea. So instead of treatment by opposites, which is hemoral pathology, the rationalist approach. Folk medicine is all about using things of a similar nature to draw out what is causing harm. And so the theories themselves are. Opposite.

• 1:23:13Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  And that I think that it's interesting to look at as just another way that Hippocratic medicine was distinguishing itself from folk medicine.

• 1:23:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Can I bring up, okay, so this is a thing that you've just led me to start to ruminate on with that explanation of menstrual blood. So that idea that it is, like, I'm gonna simplify for my point.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Liv Albert?

  Like, it's basically both poison and curative.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:47Liv Albert?

  Right? So are you familiar with the Euripides play? The, I just covered it, and it's like one guy's very three-letter name. Um, it, it, so there, there's a Euripides play, which apparently the word will never come to me, even though I just looked up it. But anyway, it's the one where Creusa's son, she was raped by Apollo, and her son is the named character, whose name I can't remember, because his name is just literally the title of the play. It starts with an I, and I've lost it so completely. Thank you. Oh, it's just fucking Ion. Jesus H. Christ, I appreciate it.

• 1:24:27Liv Albert?

  Anyway, so in the Ion, there is this truly bizarre reference to Gorgon blood. And I, it's funny, because I, I had to go through it when I, I wrote this big old piece on Medusa, and this Gorgon blood is so separate from the other mythological details of the Gorgons, that it really feels like I, in my, in my section of this book, I called it the, uh, it, it, the Phlegrian Gorgon, because the story is that this Gorgon

• 1:25:05Liv Albert?

  Uh, in this play, it said that this was a Gorgon killed during the Dragon Atomaki in Southern Italy instead, like basically separating this Gorgon from the Medusa of the Gorgons. Um, but this Gorgon's blood is said to be both curative and poisonous. And it's like this one reference to a Gorgon's blood being anything like that. It doesn't really exist anywhere else. And now I'm like, oh shit, Euripides is playing with this idea, I assume. Like, that's so cool and makes it so much more interesting. And already the Ion is the most fascinatingly feminist play. So just to like, add that, I'm, oh my God, it's so good. It's literally about how Apollo is a rapist and how PTSD from assault in women is real.

• 1:25:47Liv Albert?

  It literally treats this woman's sexual assault by Apollo as the trauma that it would be.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:54Liv Albert?

  It's so good. It's still, you know, had to be Greek at the end. And like, so it's wrapped up in a bow and Apollo isn't in trouble. But then it also has this reference to this blood, which then she wants to use to kill her son that she doesn't know is her son because he's working for Apollo. And it's this whole wild, incredible thing. But oh my God, it just makes me love Euripides even more, basically to say like, oh no, there's almost no way he wasn't connecting to this idea.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  For sure. I mean, and again, happens in medicine, right? Like there are certain things that if you have too much of it, or if it's not treated or compounded in a certain way, it's poisonous and toxic to the human body. And other instances, it's chemotherapy.

• 1:26:36Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  Right? Like, again, these ideas have, uh, the, we still are engaging with them in our medical practices today. Um, there's just more rational science behind it, but those concepts don't go away of like, things that could cause harm can also be healing in some manner. So like, yeah, I'm not surprised that, again, i- it is really fun to see how playwrights are actually engaging with medical texts as well, because you don't necessarily think about it that way. But yeah.

• 1:27:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and now I just can't get over it because it's like this Gorgon that already is like, This completely not like doesn't fit into any of the other Gorgon stories. And has this bizarre blood that we've otherwise never heard of. And yeah, to have that link, I'm just now obsessed and wish I could have written it into that book.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  Well, and I mean, that makes sense because Gorgon's eyes are also apotropaic. They're kind of, I imagine they're, they're similar to the evil eye. And same as giant penises by the Romans, they're. Somehow.

• 1:27:38Liv Albert?

  The whole Gorgon face is apotropaic, like the, just the Gorgonian as a concept. Yeah. So to have that.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, if you think about it, that's how they operate, right? They assume that you are bringing evil to it. And so you've, you fight evil with evil. You fight fire with fire. Uh, it's kind of the idea. So I thought that was, that was just kind of an interesting thing. I had noticed that again, in practice, people were using both. Because people will do whatever it takes to regain health, to maintain their health. That just doesn't change.

• 1:28:16Liv Albert?

  I'm, I'm not going to get over this idea of, of menstrual blood being so like poisonous too, like and corrosive. Cause it's like, did no one just think like, we could check? Like no one thought like, we, it's not hard. Like we've all got, you know, uteruses in our lives, even if they, you know, we don't respect the, the human attached to them. Like why ha, did anyone test it?

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's, it's such an, like menstrual blood is, again, it's one of these features of. Uh, a human body with a uterus, a functioning uterus produces menstrual blood, right? And it's actually not harmful to the woman herself. Which is interesting. So that means, uh, but blood in general, like you can't go and. And you can't go to a sanctuary, some place dedicated to gods or immortality. Because if you introduce that, it pollutes it, right? So menstrual blood is polluting. But women are immune to that pollution. Or they're inured against it.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  And that's also, you know, we tie a lot to who was responsible for handling the dead and preparing the dead. Um, in ancient Greece. It's women because they're already polluted to some extent that they can handle the miasma of a dead body. Uh, they can handle mortality in a way that the gods or men are not predisposed to.

• 1:29:48Liv Albert?

  It's so fascinating because it's simultaneously like so empowering and so reductive and gross. And like, it's like this, it's this recognition that you, you know, I'm, we're saying women, we do mean people with a uterus. Um, especially to now more than ever, we do mean that. But like, it, it, when it comes, it's, it's important to say women in the ancient world because it was coming with this very heavy, uh, burden of like existence. So, but like, they, they were able to recognize that women, that uterus has held this like enormous power that they would never be able to harness.

• 1:30:31Liv Albert?

  And all they could do is like, use, you know, like really just dehumanize to the point of being able to utilize this uterus outside of its human body. But at the same time, like, I, it's just, it's so, I don't know, it's so wild. It's so wild to me. It reminds me of, and I think this is another timely thing to say in this episode, but of this, I saw a TikTok the other day where, um, a person, I'm, I'm going to assume they were a trans person based on this context. But that they were replying to a TikTok video of a woman, uh, a, a woman who had like asked with, with very, you know, compassionate sincerity, asked for someone to explain why conservatives are so fucking afraid of trans people.

• 1:31:16Liv Albert?

  And this person's response will live with me forever. And I feel like it's, it's kind of what I've, it's kind of what I've just never been able to fully put into words. But like what, why I push the way I do in this show, but it's that, that, you know, the conservatives and by, by that, we do mean. The patriarchal structure is so afraid of trans people because they can't control them in the way that the patriarchy has learned to control women. Because they have used everything you're saying is this, this, like these 2,500 years of finding thi- this method of control, right? The dehumanization, the fact that

• 1:31:58Liv Albert?

  people with a uterus are just incorrect men, that they can just be used and controlled. And so when we have trans people who are, say, women but don't have a uterus, or men but don't have a penis, you know? They are this enormous threat to the patriarchy because they cannot be controlled by that patriarchy. And it's why white women who are so fully deep into the patriarchy are, you know, just as against trans people as the men. And I mean, obviously beyond white women, but we all know that they're the biggest problem. And like, yeah, it's just so wild to me. And it just is like, yes, all of that is so true about the patriarchy

• 1:32:41Liv Albert?

  conservatives and their utter fear of trans people because they cannot be controlled. But it is also so in line with the struggle of women for the last 2,500 years because we are all struggling against the patriarchy. Like literally, it's not about, you know, who's got a uterus or who doesn't. It's about this struggle against the patriarchy.

• 1:33:02Liv Albert?

  Anyway, you're just giving me all the origins of it and I love and hate it.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I'm finally to the, the whole focus of our talk and we're only what, an hour and a half? Was like, where do women fit into all of this Hippocratic medicine nonsense? And, you know, I've, I've, I've talked about the, we've mentioned it a few times. It's like, all right, women are inferior bodies to men because of the uterus. And you know what the solution to all of their problems is? Have sex and get pregnant.

• 1:33:38Liv Albert?

  Well, naturally, because then they're of use.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Liv Albert?

  Cause that's the only time when women are of use to the patriarchy is when they're full of another baby.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  Well, that's how you stop the bleeding.

• 1:33:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, of course. And that's why that's the right way to be. Cause once you're filled up with the baby, you're not gonna bleed. I just like, I wanna scream all the time.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  It's literally, it's just like, people just, it's like, and considering the reaction to Pixar's, um, what is it? Going Red, that movie?

• 1:34:06Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah. I forget what it was, but yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  Saying some things have not changed.

• 1:34:12Liv Albert?

  Yes. No, but yes, like it's so, it's so wild and it just, everything, when, the more I learn about this stuff and the, the ancient world, but also up until today is like, it just what, what stands out so much is this bizarre lack of curiosity. This bizarre disinterest in examining a body that is different from your own. Like, why are you so afraid of learning? Like, why are these men, this patriarchal structure? Like, I mean, I know why ultimately when I phrase it like the patriarchal structure, because if they know too much about women, if they humanize women and recognize that no matter your gender or sex, like we are all fucking human beings,

• 1:34:56Liv Albert?

  then like they are, they lose that control. You cannot control a population that you treat as equal to your own. And so the more, you know, and, and, and it's just so much more nefarious now that because white women have been granted this, like just the tier below the men, that they now will uphold the patriarchy against, you know, marginalized people of all types. And it's just like, it's so fucking wild. And I guess I could just keep talking about this forever, but it's just fucking fucked up.

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why Hippocratic medicine, and I, I have a tentative title at the top, like women's patience with Hippocratic medicine. We'll get into the word patience too.

• 1:35:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  Is that not only have you stigmatized. A folk medical practice that women are heavily involved in.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  You're also using your ideas of medicine to define the female body as inferior. Not just in it's like more likely to get illness, but saying that it's incapable of thinking in a rational manner. So it is intentionally trying to not only delegitimize folk medical practices. And we, we see this in the language of the epigraphy. It's trying to say that women are not capable

• 1:36:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  of even rational medicine. And that's what you see in the epigraphy or a lot of like references to women to Medica is like despite her gender or she practiced like a man, like there is this element of like,

• 1:36:32Liv Albert?

  It's the dehumanization.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  She can do this despite her, her sex.

• 1:36:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so much for listening. Please check out more on the Memory Collective, my new, my and Michaela's new collective of people doing interesting stuff for the public. If you want to learn more about history, specifically how history has been impacted by the patriarchal structure in which we live. Collectivemem.com Again, it is linked in the episode's description and check out our first two podcasts. Joining this podcast network within the Memory Collective, Sweet Bitter and Movies We Dig.

• 1:37:32Liv Albert?

  We are going to be bringing you as much as possible because I just think that this is really important stuff. And I can't wait to be a part of sharing it more widely. Let's talk what Miss Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Panguish is the producer, the Hermes to my Olympians and the co-founder of this new Memory Collective. Select music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of my own goddamn podcast network, The Memory Collective. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for our newsletter where we will be sharing information about The Memory Collective as we have it. MythsBaby.com/newsletter.

• 1:38:15Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so fucking much. Rage against the goddamn patriarchy. Burn this shit to the ground and punch a Nazi while you're at it. I am Liv and I love this shit.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 1:39:26Speaker 04

  Love the crown molding.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 1:39:39Speaker 04

  No FiOS? Yeah, no thank you.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 1:39:45Speaker 05

  Get Verizon FiOS because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at GetHumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:40:22Speaker 06

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  The much awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.

• 1:40:52Speaker 06

  And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.