Conversations: Women's Patience/Patients & Hippocratic Medicine w/ Dr Christie Vogler (Part 2)

TW! Horrors of Women's/Female Health. Liv speaks with Dr Christie Vogler about the long and storied and utterly infuriating ancient history of women's medicine in the West. Check out Christie's podcast, Movies We Dig movieswedig.com, now part of the Memory Collective https://open.acast.com/networks/67a2a8858d79caff8e7693ee/shows/67a1934c95d7c2516aeb49a7/episodes/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 Recommended reading and sources: Cleghorn, Elinor. 2022. Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-made World; Cooper Owens, Deirdre. 2018. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology; Draycott, Jane. 2021. Roman Domestic Medical Practice in Central Italy: From the Middle Republic to the Early Empire; Joshel, Sandra R. 1992. Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions; Mulder, Tara. 2016. “The Hippocratic Oath in Roe v. Wade | by Tara Mulder https://eidolon.pub/the-hippocratic-oath-in-roe-v-wade-ded59eedfd8f.” EIDOLON; Nutton, Vivian. 2013. Ancient Medicine; Ripat, Pauline. 2016. “Roman Women, Wise Women, and Witches https://doi.org/10.7834/phoenix.70.1-2.0104.”; “Roe v. Wade | 410 U. S. 113 (1973) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/.”; Stanley Spaeth, Barbette. 2014. “From Goddess to Hag: The Greek and the Roman Witch in Classical Literature.” In Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World, edited by Kimberly B. Stratton and Dayna S. Kalleres; Upson-Saia, Kristi, Heidi Marx, and Jared Secord. 2023. Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE–600 CE): A Sourcebook; Woods, Robert. 2007. “Ancient and Early Modern Mortality: Experience and Understanding http://www.jstor.org/stable/4502068.” The Economic History Review 60. 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.

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• 2:10Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, here with the second half of what began last week, my conversation with returning guest, Dr. Christie Vogler, about the history of women's health.

• 2:31Liv Albert?

  Um, so this episode is really, really interesting. I think it's also very enjoyable, just fortunately, because Christy and I get along so well, and it makes talking about a subject that is so utterly terrible and close to home right now, you know, entertaining instead of just depressing. We do try to keep it, I mean, you know, my version of light is just like, be dark, but like sarcastically. So we, you know, we try to keep it light as much as possible. But we are looking at, at this history, um, the history of Hippocratic medicine and sort of how it has gone since. I, I won't try to get into it too much. This episode is long enough, but it's really, it's really interesting,

• 3:15Liv Albert?

  and it couldn't be more important than now. So I hope you listen. I hope you like it. And please check out more from Christy. And, and know that Christy's wonderfully fun podcast, Movies We Dig, is joining the Memory Collective. Uh, we have, we're, there's lots going on. More official announcements still to come. There, there's just too many things going on. If you were over on social media too, or Instagram, rather, you might have seen that I announced that I am writing a children's retelling of The Odyssey for DK Children's Books. I am, I am so excited. Um, but that's all to say, you know, just, just like a lot, a lot in the works. Um,

• 3:58Liv Albert?

  but Christie's podcast Movies We Dig is officially joining the Memory Collective. You can listen to them wherever you get your podcasts. They are awesome and fun and lighter in a way that, uh, you know, this show isn't always. So, so give them a listen as well.

• 4:15Liv Albert?

  And in the meantime, just, just sit back and enjoy more reasons to be righteously angry with the system so that we can all just burn it to the ground.

• 4:44Liv Albert?

  Conversations, Women's Patience with Dr. Kristy Vogler.

• 5:05Liv Albert?

  I was like, I don't fully remember where we left off, but I have a feeling that Kristy is so organized. She's gonna know exactly.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  I highlighted in green, I'm like, this is where.

• 5:16Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love it. I love it. Well, I, to the listeners, we had to record this in two chunks, which is the first time I've done that for the show because we just had so much to say. And we're like, okay, no, no, let's just pause and come back next week and do a ton more.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, and as I pointed out, it's like, I'm, I'm covering so much material. I feel like I'm oversimplifying things. Like I'm, you know, Hippocratic medicine is the, the foundation of Western medicine. Like there, there's something good there because we've been doing it for so long. But I feel like I'm kind of focusing on so many negative aspects, but it's like, I had 15 weeks to teach this before and now I'm like.

• 5:59Liv Albert?

  Put it into three hours and also three hours is still gonna be like one of the longest. I mean, it's probably gonna be four and the longest I've done and still not enough because there's so much.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, there, I, there's always more, more to learn and I, you know, I was actually getting worried because it was like, man, this feels like such basic information I'm putting out there. But I loved like your responses are just like, no, I've never heard that. And that's fascinating. I'm like, oh yeah, I once upon a time too. Found this information out and was like horrified.

• 6:30Liv Albert?

  Yes, that happens with so many of my guests and I love that like because it it it becomes like somewhat normal to you as a researcher. And it can be easy to forget that like this is information that other people be like, oh, my God, that's so cool. Thank you for telling me. And then it'll like stay in their mind, you know, and keep going from there. Um, but what you said about Hippocratic is so is it's interesting. And I think a great way to like transition us like back straight back in because I think it's really, I mean, I don't know, it's so interesting to to hear all of these like origins of Western medicine type of stuff and like, yeah, you know, it definitely would have had a lot of value that we kept.

• 7:12Liv Albert?

  But I also think there's something, and maybe this is just where I'm at in the world slash obviously it is because everything's on fire. But and I've become like crazy anti colonialist and anti capitalist over the last few years, but like it just makes me think, you know, every time we hear stuff like this where it's like, oh, yeah, it's flawed, but it's the foundation. It's what we've been doing. And it's like, why as the West, because I want to specify this is such a Western thing that like, why are we so obsessed with ensuring that everything remains the same? Like there is innovation, but it's innovation that always remains in the overarching structure.

• 7:56Liv Albert?

  You know, it's like, I keep harping on democracy, which I recognize is like a problematic thing to be complaining so much about. But I also think that that's part of the propaganda against us, this idea that like, if you speak out about the structure of democracy as it currently stands, like you're somehow again, you're that you're like for totalitarianism. And I'm like, I'm pro the idea of democracy of like rule by the people. But the way that we have it now in the West, particularly in our two countries is not the rule of the people. It is an oligarchy in the form in like putting on like the hat of democracy. Because it, we don't all equal. I mean, especially in the States with gerrymandering and all this, we don't all have an equal vote. And I somehow have already turned this into an anti.

• 8:41Liv Albert?

  Western rant, but like, but the Hippocratic of it all just reminds me like, yeah, like, obviously, there is some good that it is, it did give us Western medicine and that is great. But like, what is it about these things that like, don't allow us to go and look back? And it's like, it is the patriarchal structure overall because we don't, yeah, we, if we were to go back and rewrite, you know, these origins of Western med, the, the origins of democracy. Like, if we were to go back and rewrite those things now in line with the current world, that would be a threat to the patriarchy. And so we're not allowed to even talk about there being an option of rule of the people outside of the form of democracy as it currently stands, or we're not allowed, we're not, we can't talk about like,

• 9:26Liv Albert?

  a medical structure outside of the Hippocratic structure, even though the Hippocratic structure was based on the idea that women are just wrong men. But like, but if we were to examine that structure as a whole, we would be forced to break down the patriarchy and they won't allow that. And so here we are.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And there, there are definitely medical practitioners that say healthcare is a social justice issue for all of these reasons. And I, I vividly remember a conversation I had with a student

• 9:57Speaker 05

  about, at the end of the day, it's like, it's an androcentric view of health and medicine, right?

• 10:03Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  And in some ways that simplifies it because the human body is fascinating and there's so many parts that we're still thinking like, if you think about just being able to examine the brain and how recent of a development that is.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  If you kept medicine to one standard body, there'd still be so much to figure out.

• 10:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  And this conversation I remember with a student was just kind of like, this idea of opening up more diverse opinions and, and he was an older student I had. And it was a good conversation because he points out, it's like, I just feel like all they do is just bring problems without solutions. And the counter to that is because that is what it seems like, right? It's like, we're just highlighting more and more issues that exist.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  But the problem is, those problems have never gone acknowledged. And until you acknowledge a problem exists, you can't even talk about solutions.

• 10:58Liv Albert?

  No, exactly. We have to highlight that these are issues because like, there isn't a solution. Like, when you are talking about something so overarching and so structural, like so enormous in terms of the breadth of like, the history of this issue, you can't just be like, well, here's the solution. Because the solution is a complete structural change. It is the dismantling of the capitalist patriarchy as it currently stands. And if we're to go and be like, well, here are all the problems, the solution is all of you men have to step the fuck back and look, like, look critically at this. Like, you can't just be like, that's the solution, even though that's the solution.

• 11:42Liv Albert?

  But it reminds me of like, how, you know, in, in Western medicine too, there, it not only is it androcentric, but it is also, you know, was developed exclusively with like, the white people in mind, like quote unquote white, because it's like, it's broad, but it reminds me of how like, you know, particularly in North America and obviously like, worse in the States, black women die in childbirth, like, I don't even know what the statistics are, but they're horrifying. And like, more than white women, because all of the medicine has been based around not only white people, because I think that if, if, even if all of it had been based on white people and just generally like, just

• 12:27Liv Albert?

  as a, as a like, testing, that would still be a problem, but it would not even be as big a problem as it is, which is that the idea was that black people like, didn't feel pain the same way, so they didn't treat them the same way, like, those kind of structural things exist in how we founded Western medicine. And so, to look at something like that where it is on its face, like, only about white men and everyone who is not a white man is suffering under this medical system, like, obviously, the, the solution is only to dismantle it and put it back together in a different way. But that's true of the whole patriarchy. Anyway, um.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  And just to highlight that, like, that goes back to, you know, these four humors are associated with particular colors, red, yellow, um, coloric. Hang on, black bile, which one am I missing? I'm missing one more. Red, yellow.

• 13:23Liv Albert?

  Something blue.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Is it white? It might be white.

• 13:26Liv Albert?

  Like, like phlegm or pus or something?

• 13:28Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. So white.

• 13:31Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  And, and as I mentioned, it's like Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, who we never problematically hear about in our textbooks when we learn about, you know, the advancements of science and everything. He did that to humans and he literally, it's like red is native indigenous people. Black.

• 13:49Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  Yellow is Asian, white. And then he said they're different species so that you can then go into these experimentation saying that like a certain race of individuals can handle pain differently.

• 14:01Liv Albert?

  There we go, yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Than this, this one can. Yeah.

• 14:05Liv Albert?

  That's horrifying, horrifying. Like, that's, yeah, and I just. I, it's so, it's so hard to have these conversations when you know that the, that there is an entire group of people who don't see this as a problem or don't see it as a, like patriarchal structural problem, like they're, you know, like the colorblind people, the, you know, those white people who just head in the sands, like pull up your bootstraps or like, you know, sorry, this is, I don't, I don't mean this to become so political, but obviously also I'm me. But like, you know, we're, we're seeing right now all of the DEI stuff coming away, like

• 14:48Liv Albert?

  being repealed and people are talking about like, oh no, they'll have to work on their merits. And it's like, it was never about merits.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  Obviously.

• 14:56Liv Albert?

  Obviously.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Who just got cabinet positions in our government.

• 15:00Liv Albert?

  Yes, it was never about merits. The reason why, I saw Akela Hughes posted this somewhere. I saw it on Instagram, but it was like a screenshot of like Twitter or some threads or I don't know. It was text. Um, but it was, I want to attribute it to Akela Hughes because it was so, it was so formative. Like she was just saying like, it wasn't, DEI wasn't created, you know, to just diversify for the sake of diversifying. DEI was created because the white people in charge were always hiring their underqualified white friends. It's not about merit. It's about like. I mean, what what's the it's I just want to keep saying oligarchy and I know in this case it's not it but like, you know, it's the nepotism.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  Nepotism, yeah.

• 15:42Liv Albert?

  It was created to just allow other people to have a chance to use their merits, to be selected based on their merits, like, but white people are so threatened by that, that it's like, because they are, I mean, I I say white people are threatened and I mean it like as if like, because they're, you know, it's all in their heads, but also like, they should be fucking threatened. We do not have any inherent, like, abilities more than anyone else. And if that means that you're not going to get the job because somebody else has fucking merit, like, get out, I don't know, I just, I'm just turning in this episode into yelling.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  I know, I know. That's what's hard. Medicine is political, like.

• 16:21Liv Albert?

  Well, and when we're recording this and like, it's just, I feel like I can't.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, and we'll, we'll get into more politics, um, later. I wanted to highlight, like, a couple of things to, like, get us back.

• 16:34Liv Albert?

  Perfect, because it's been eleven minutes of me just screaming about the patriarchy.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I'm all here for screaming at the patriarchy, because what else can you do at some point? Um, so last time I mentioned that a lot of my research was based on Vivian Newton's work. Uh, the other work I wanted to mention today, and this is a, I think this just got published last year. Um, it's the work of Christy Upson Seiya, Heidi Marks, and Jared Secord, which is Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean. So when I start talking about women's health here, I'm working from them quite a bit, uh, because they, it's so weird, because like, I've never been in certain conversations with people, but when you're like, seeing your research or words in someone else's book, you're like, oh, I should get to know you and like, thank you.

• 17:19Liv Albert?

  So you're, you're quoted in there?

• 17:21Speaker 05

  I'm not, no, I just like, feel like I.

• 17:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, no, no, yeah, I get it. Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  To some extent.

• 17:25Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, you're in terms of what you researched so deeply. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  So, which, you know, happens because a lot of people are involved in the study of medicine and.

• 17:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah, go make some new friends.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  We should totally be friends. That's why when I listened to Utah with Helen King and I'm like, she was so like, she was in my dissertation. I was so excited.

• 17:46Liv Albert?

  Oh my, also, she was like the nicest person. Like, we had so much fun. If you sent her an email, I'm willing to bet. She'd be like, let's chat about stuff. I can cut that out if you want, but like generally, oh my god. Yeah, but I will say she was the nicest person. That was such a fun episode. Michaela and I were like, Michaela was on that one, but not in it. And oh, my God, she, no, we were just like, losing our minds. It was so great.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  So, so where we, so last episode was mostly just Hippocratic medicine. How did it come about? Who's Hippocrates? What has it done to us in the meantime? And the kind of question I was ending on is, okay, if Hippocratic medicine is androcentric and basically treats women as inferior bodies to men, why would?

• 18:30Liv Albert?

  Obviously, we should use it to build our entire Western structure. I'm sorry. It's just that you say that stuff again, and I think, what? I just want to scream into the abyss. Okay, sorry. Yeah, women are the wrong bodies.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  And, and like, they, like, what makes them so different from men is their uterus, which apparently just wanders around in the body. And that seems silly to think about, but like, one of the major reasons medicine could just assume that for the longest time is there was this huge taboo against actually doing human dissection. So like, even, even like, opening up a corpse, you hear later in later centuries of like, grave robbing and taking the corpses to medical schools.

• 19:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  That does not happen under the Greeks. They're like, no, no, we still, we might say there's a rational explanation for illness, but nobody wants to be haunted. Like, that, so no one wants that.

• 19:23Liv Albert?

  Do you think it was, like, so I, I think about haunting, for sure, which I love that for them. But also, like, I think, I feel like it was also that pollution, right? Like, not wanting to dissect a body because

• 19:33Speaker 05

  Cause they would dissect human, or not humans. They would dissect animals, or they'd perform vivisections, which is live dissections of animals. A lot of people benefited from either working in the milit- So the Roman military developed what might be considered the first like hospital system in the Western world. Because they just they had a bunch of people who were injured and sick all the time. So you would have doctors who'd get to do surgery there. Galen worked as the doctor for a gladiator school for a period of time. So he got to learn a lot about like muscles and things like that from that experience. So but that was the closest you could get is someone else cut up the body and you get a get a little gander before you sew them back.

• 20:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and I imagine they weren't doing that to women in in most cases because I mean if there if it is primarily on like sort of a military a a a military like kind of purpose, they're not they're they're not seeing where the womb is because they're not allowing women in those spaces. So they're just continuing to assume it's wandering around.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  They there's the assumption there. And then, you know, if you have like a prolapsed uterus, which might be one of the most common things you would come across in a woman that you would get to see, it's like, well, obviously the uterus just moved somewhere it's not supposed to be. And so like, you know, what they could observe is in part like.

• 20:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah, confirming something.

• 20:56Speaker 05

  Confirming, yeah.

• 20:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So so so, yeah, the question is like, you know, if if folk medicine was a major competition for Hippocratic medicine um and it was gender like that was a space that women could operate in, why would some women then choose to become Medica? Why would they choose to train in Hippocratic medicine? And like, to me, that's a really interesting question. It's like, why do you choose to work with the system that is subjugating you and and dehumanizing you to a certain extent?

• 21:26Liv Albert?

  I mean, isn't that the question?

• 21:30Speaker 05

  It really is, right?

• 21:31Liv Albert?

  It is a big, enormous question. Screams at all of the white women.

• 21:41Liv Albert?

  I mean, us being some of them, but Jesus.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  You know, it's the same idea of like people who want to get into the system because they want to change it from within. That's another possibility, whether or not that is. Workable, that's a whole nother matter, but like, you know, there can be different reasons for doing so. Um, so, yeah. So as I mentioned last time, a major problem for women in medicine is the uterus. The solution to that problem is sex and pregnancy. And I'm pulling out another book because it's just, when you lay out the logic, the logic of it, you're like, how does that make any sense that that would be a cure in Hippocratic medicine?

• 22:24Speaker 05

  And I'm going back to, um, Plagueorn's book, Unwell Women, and she just, she just lays it out really well. Uh, on the Greek island of coasts, many centuries, this is just an anecdote that she made up herself. Uh, a girl was taken ill. At first she felt strangely weak, her chest heavy and tight. Soon she began to shiver with fever. Pain gripped her heart. Terrifying hallucinations swarmed her mind. She was found wandering the streets, so consumed by heat and hurt that she wanted to end her life. Throwing herself down a well or hanging from a tree by a noose would have been pleasant compared to the torment that racked her body and mind. So that was an assumption is that like the wandering womb could like cause a young girl to go so mad that she would unalive herself, basically.

• 23:08Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Um, her father called for the physician, a man trained in the arts of healing. The physician had seen this illness before in girls who had started to menstruate but hadn't yet married. As they developed into puberty, their plentiful female blood had been used up by growing. So like they have so much blood in their body, but you're growing. So that's not, you don't have a surplus of it. That would make sense.

• 23:31Liv Albert?

  Plentiful female blood.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  Plentiful. Once they had grown into women, all that extra blood accumulated in their wombs, ready to spill out every month. All physicians knew that this was how the female body stayed healthy. This girl was drowning in her own blood. It had no way to flow out, so it had traveled from her womb back through her veins and flaming her heart and poisoning her senses. The physician urged the girl's father to marry her off without delay. Intercourse would open her body so her blood would flow out and pregnancy would make her healthy. And like, it's horrifying, but like you see kind of the weird, strange logic behind it when you can't fully understand what menstruation is.

• 24:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  And that that's not the cause.

• 24:15Liv Albert?

  Oh, that like, that hurts more than most. That just like the imagining of what that ends up looking like. I mean, it's like saying that rape would solve her problems. Like that's essentially,

• 24:29Liv Albert?

  essentially what they're saying. You know what? It, it makes me want to rethink, certain mythological things, you know, like I, I think so much about the women that Zeus, you know, assaulted and pregnant, all of these different things. And those stories go down and down and down. And like, you know, there, there are so many things to break down about like what that is saying about a culture. But that feels like one of those things of like, well, don't worry, like a god will come down and fuck it out of you.

• 25:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, I, that's just kind of scary that that like, that's secure and that's what, you know, that ends up becoming some of

• 25:14Speaker 05

  the logic in marrying girls off young too, right? Like,

• 25:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  to much older men in their lives and you don't get to really have a childhood as a result. Because not only is this being reinforced culturally, you're now reinforcing this through medical literature.

• 25:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's, it's medically like recommended assault essentially. Like it's like, yeah, they can say marry off, but this girl is like fucking 13 or some shit. And she is being quote unquote married off. That's, it's forced rape. It's literally forced rape to heal what is almost certainly like, you know, like PMS related fucking depression, like straight up PMDD, like, yeah, this woman is suffering from extreme PMDD and they're like, fuck it out of her.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the alternatives weren't much better. So

• 26:15Liv Albert?

  Surprise!

• 26:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the Hippocratic author, there is a book called The Diseases of Women, posits that women are susceptible to ailments of, so another word for wandering room is uterine suffocation.

• 26:30Speaker 05

  And so a number of treatments would be prescribed for these ailments. You would have purgatives that were either ingested or delivered through suppositories that would provoke the expulsion of an overabundant humor. So if you were very unlucky, they were trying to repel the womb. So they would have women inhale foul smells or ingest a repulsive drink. Sometimes it was nicer. Sometimes they would lure the womb with good smells. But this involved the process of fumigation, where you would smoke out a woman's vagina with sweet smelling fragrances, or inserting pleasant smelling pessaries, like, okay, not a fun solution there.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  Other treatments, because again, a lot of it's associated with too much blood, included cupping, bloodletting, bathing, herbal douches, massage, including digital palpation of the vagina. No wonder you have all of these later Roman men being like, um, I think they're gonna try and poison me and steal my wife. And binding the woman's midsection. So those were the alternatives to, you know what, just make sure she's having enough sex and gets pregnant. Because according to ancient medical writers, that was the most effective treatment.

• 27:49Liv Albert?

  Like I

• 27:55Liv Albert?

  Sorry, I'm so horrified.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, so this is what kind of we've been talking about, and Uppsensia, Marx and Secord kind of point this out too, that historians notice how ancient gynecology buttressed the interests of elite men and the state. So first, it entrenches men's superior status by grounding gender hierarchy in anatomical distinctions, and then this later goes into race as well, as we've talked about. And then second, the dominant treatment for women's illness, especially pregnancy and childbirth, ultimately served the reproductive interests of elite households who wanted to pass on their family name and wealth to heirs, while also serving to the reproductive interests of the state, which was continually dealing with population shortages.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  And so that's why you see things now like white replacement theory and low birth rates being a major concern in some nation states. And why they are creating laws that instead of supporting women and giving them social safety nets that make them feel safe in like producing more children, they're just like, no, we're just going to force you to have more children and not provide those safety nets.

• 29:08Liv Albert?

  I, it's, I hear stuff like this and then I think back to the volume of people over the eight years that I've been doing this show who, I mean, and also like this, this is true for the whole of our fucking world, but like the people who say that the patriarchy isn't a thing. Or that it's like an excuse. And it's like, are you fucking, are you just not paying attention? Like, are you, do you just have your eyes closed? Like, what are you fucking thinking? Like, this is literally the, I mean, everything we talk about all the time.

• 29:49Liv Albert?

  Like, I, I mean, my entire career, I think, is based around like looking at the origins and evidence of the patriarchal structure and how oppressive and dangerous it is. And just like you're saying, like, this began in these worlds where they could oppress women. And then as soon as these notions of race hierarchy were even like beginning to be imagined, they were like, great, we can use this also to oppress people who we don't see as appealing. This is like tangentially related, but it's a thing I learned recently and I just want to say it here, but. The country that I'm not going to say its name, but you know, the one that's currently committing genocide,

• 30:31Liv Albert?

  according to all of the necessary international courts. That country, I saw someone talking about how in, I think it was like the eighties, maybe, you know, that country's only been around since 1948, so we can't go that far back.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 30:46Liv Albert?

  Um, but there, there was a period where they were getting a lot of immigrants from Africa. And it's important that I, you know, state this part, but they were Jewish, right? Like that, that is a requirement. They, so they were Jewish, they were falling into the categories necessary, but they were black because they were coming from Africa. And a lot of Western cultures don't like to understand that those things have spread and that like, obviously, especially with a religion as ancient as Judaism, and this is where I talk about Judaism as a lovely ancient religion, like,

• 31:26Liv Albert?

  obviously, obviously there are people are everywhere and that's why this country is really not about Judaism, but about apartheid because they secretly sterilized all of these women through like requiring vaccinations in order for them to immigrate to the country where you know, they're supposed to be able to go because of their birthright. And they sterilized them because sure, they, in order to uphold their apartheid regime, like they have to accept those people because otherwise it doesn't make any sense, because it still doesn't make any sense, but they're not going to let them reproduce there, right? And it's like, that's a problem a lot, like it, it's like, and, and yeah, I mean,

• 32:09Liv Albert?

  it all just leads into eugenics. We are all, you know, this, the phrase is, I, I've been using it a lot and it, it has come up a lot lately, but like, none of us are free until all of us are free. Like this is all interconnected, the history, the oppression, the resistance, right?

• 32:27Speaker 05

  The, the one thing I like to point out is when it comes to.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  Bodily autonomy, as it relates to abortion rights, is like, especially when I'm talking to people who are, you know, they, they wouldn't practice abortion themselves, they wouldn't choose out for their family. Or they might view themselves as libertarian. It's like, the minute you let your institution, your state government, say, when you can't have an abortion, you also allow, allow them the power to decide when they can force an abortion on you.

• 33:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  And we have done that in the United States. In fact, there was, during the child separation policy, there was a doctor who just went down and examined women, and when they went under, he literally gave them hysterectomies.

• 33:17Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  Without their knowledge.

• 33:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Like, that, that is the real danger. It's like, the loss of bodily autonomy in this one regard means that the government can control your bodily autonomy in whatever way they see fit.

• 33:30Liv Albert?

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, forced sterilization in the Western world is an incredibly common thing in our history. Like, and again, like, this is something that, I mean, you see it in headlines, again, with that country all the time. Like, if, if you're looking in the right places, you can see that, oh, I recently saw that they, they, they, a newspaper in, in that country, they released a report of like, it was a, a, a survey of people, and who, I think it was like seventy percent called immigrants from Africa. Again, immigrants which do technically fit into the apartheid structure, but tech, but also don't, clearly.

• 34:14Liv Albert?

  They were, they, seventy percent called them a cancer. The word was cancer. And it's like, we, yeah, i- i- if we, I just don't even know what to say. Like, it's just so far

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Medical terms are commonly used to

• 34:29Liv Albert?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  So, so our, our president's latest statement of cleaning out Gaza, like, has these connotations of sanitation. Medical terminology is commonly used to, again, dehumanize because then you have to identify something as harmful, polluting, dirty.

• 34:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's all Nazi talk, right? It's all Nazi talk.

• 34:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's all medical talk, too, which is a scary thing.

• 34:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah, but I mean, that's what I, yeah, that's the missing piece in in my sentence is that like, because the Nazis did all of this, the Nazis did medical tests, the Nazis, you know, um, you know, I just to apropos of nothing, absolutely out of nowhere, um, but the use of the term Asperger's to describe a subsection of autism is coming from a Nazi doctor. That name is a Nazi term and it was intentionally created to separate autistic people from those with high need requirements and those with low and give them this out, this thing that made them special and different. And um, to have somebody use that term to describe themselves whilst explaining that they didn't do a Nazi salute, like, it just doesn't work.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So, so, yeah, are you ready to have your mind blown some more?

• 35:48Liv Albert?

  Oh, I don't know, Kristy. I'm sorry if I will inevitably derail everything you have to tell me with my horror.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  All of this will just make us angry and like, my hopes is in making us angry. We will respond in a way that will make helpful changes because, again, healthcare is a social justice issue and we should treat it as such.

• 36:08Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  So.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  I I I tentatively have titled this as like, uh, women's patience with Hippocratic medicine, right? When you are being patient, what does that usually mean you are experiencing in a moment?

• 36:23Liv Albert?

  You're waiting.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  What?

• 36:25Liv Albert?

  You're waiting.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Waiting? Is it just waiting?

• 36:30Liv Albert?

  Oh, God, I know you're getting somewhere.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Like, imagine if you're trying to be patient with a customer.

• 36:37Liv Albert?

  Right, yeah, no, you're, yeah, you're waiting, but you're waiting in a way that is like.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Suffering.

• 36:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah, oh, suffering, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  So, um, this blew my mind to like, realize, uh, coming again from, uh, Upsinseya.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  And et al's work is, um, hang on, must find it to make sure I'm saying it. The ancient physicians prized patients who showed proper submission to and reverence for the expertise of physicians, as well as patients who mustered the courage and fortitude necessary to endure painful or distasteful medical treatments, the worst of which, again, seemed to be reserved for women. Because if you also think about like the ultimate cure being pregnancy.

• 37:21Speaker 05

  Women's mortality rates in the ancient world are not great.

• 37:24Liv Albert?

  No, I bet.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  So your cure could be a death sentence.

• 37:29Liv Albert?

  That, that, I mean. Yeah, I'll just be horrified forever. But that sentence really hits home what we were talking about earlier with, um, the way that we in the West, uh, treat black people and the way that doctors up to this day, in a lot of cases, have been taught that they have a higher pain tolerance. And I just, like, it, it really boggles the mind to, to be able to like, think something like that without any kind of logical thing in the back of your head being like, that doesn't make any sense. And through basic, common knowledge of history, I can tell you

• 38:14Liv Albert?

  exactly where that idea came from and how terrible it is. And it's quite literally that these patients, and I, I say this because of the way you use that word, but like, black people as patients were enslaved, they were forced to bear pain. That doesn't mean they don't feel it like us. It was forced upon them. And then the white people forcing them into pain and submission were like, oh, look, they can handle it. Let's write it into the medical books that black people can handle pain differently. Like, are you fucking high?

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Yep. And that goes back into the thing of like, assuming races have like a difference, they are a different human species because. That's just it. They, black women, were attributed of having super bodies that could tolerate pain, and therefore you do all of your experimental-

• 39:08Liv Albert?

  Exactly. That, yeah, that's why, because they were forced to have experiments done on them, and they didn't die. Like, are you kidding?

• 39:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, in fact, Doctor, I'm pretty sure it's Sims is his name, who's considered the father of gynecology.

• 39:20Liv Albert?

  Great, but we love him.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, his development of gynecology was not even through ownering slaves. He just went down to the South and rented women.

• 39:30Liv Albert?

  Fuck off. Holy shit.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Not only were the ones being treated by him and experimented on, they also worked for him at the same time. So they became trained in the same procedures. And most of them are unnamed. They don't go, they aren't credited as the mothers of gynecology.

• 39:49Liv Albert?

  Of course.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  So, yeah.

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• 43:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:09Liv Albert?

  The idea that there's a father of gynecology, like.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  The best part is there, there's a letter written to him by his father. His father basically says, like, being a doctor is not a real profession. Go, go get a real job.

• 43:23Liv Albert?

  Like, well, at least that, I don't, like, I just, I, yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, so so our, our word for patient um, comes from the Latin patience, meaning one who suffers, one who endures suffering with forbearance and courage, and one who is submissive.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  And

• 43:43Liv Albert?

  This is the only time that like moments like this are when I wish we did a video just so that people can see. Cause I don't, sometimes I am horrified into silence and then I have to like say this because my face is showing way too much. And I just like,

• 43:57Liv Albert?

  I hate everything. And I think, I just have to say this out loud because it's occurring to me in this moment. But like, sometimes I feel, especially on this show, that like, I must get annoying because all I do now is like, educate people on how terrible everything is and was and has been and still is. And I think like, oh gosh, I must be obnoxious. It must be exhausting for people listening to me. And then I just have to remind myself, it's exhausting being me in this way where like, I don't want to make it about myself. But I mean it in that like, I love this job. I love that I get to learn all of this stuff. And I'm sure it sounds so over the top because I'm con- and I mean, I mean this with my friends too, because I'm just always talking about

• 44:42Liv Albert?

  the horrors of the world. And I think I need to remind myself to be kind in that like, the reason I am doing that is because I have built a career on educating people on the horrors of the world, which means that I am forced to live in it in a way that most people are not. It's like every week I talk to somebody and every week, especially right now, like, I mean, I, I tend to try to make it educational in, in that like, social justice, kind of like, just doing good for the world kind of way. And I want the show to be educational in that way more and more, but it also means that I then have to learn literally everything fucking horrible that's happened in the past 3,000 years. And I'm just noticing how much of a toll it actually takes on my brain.

• 45:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:26Liv Albert?

  No, I

• 45:28Speaker 05

  So, so hopefully I'm gonna put a fun spin on it. Cause earlier I asked, like, these women, right? How are the, why are these women claiming this term, claiming this particular medical knowledge?

• 45:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 05

  And it, you know, the one thing I've always liked is that women, no matter what, have figured out ways to subvert the system.

• 45:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  Right?

• 45:45Liv Albert?

  Fuck yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  So, um.

• 45:46Liv Albert?

  We're fucking smart.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So my, my thought was like, oh, a good patient is submissive. Does that mean a man would be submissive to a female doctor?

• 45:59Speaker 05

  How does that work?

• 46:00Liv Albert?

  I'm willing to bet that's not what it means.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  But you have to, like.

• 46:04Liv Albert?

  But technically, I, yeah, technically.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Technically, that's what it means.

• 46:07Liv Albert?

  But in practice.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  So I, you know, I, going back to Agnadeke's story in particular, just to highlight this whole mess, there's a line.

• 46:15Liv Albert?

  Can you remind us what that?

• 46:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. So Agnadeke is the story of, um, a woman in Athens. And it's, it's done by Hyginus and his Fabulae. So it's an etiological story, meaning like there, it's an origin for something. I'm not sure exactly what, because historically, there is no law that ever prohibited women from becoming doctors, as far as we're aware. Um, but it basically says, like, women couldn't be doctors. And all of these, it acknowledged, like, all these women were dying of childbirth. And Hyginus uses this line, the ancients didn't have obstetricians. And as a result, women, because of modesty, perished.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  And Agnadeke saw this, she dressed up as a, a boy, went and trained with a very famous, actual historically known physician who worked in Alexandria. And is thought to have authored one of the first texts on gynecology. Came back, um, went to treat her, the first, uh, woman she came into contact with. The woman refused, because she didn't want to see a doctor to see her body. So she revealed herself to be a woman and she's like, okay, cool. And then all the other doctors were getting mad at Agnadeke, being like, she must be doing something, because all of the women are asking for her. Are asking for him to treat them. So she gets brought in front of the court being like, oh, you must be like a charlatan or a fake. It's like, well, no, like they want me because I'm

• 47:43Speaker 05

  a woman and she has to reveal herself again in front of the court of men.

• 47:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, it's like another, um, what's her name? Uh, Frene.

• 47:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. And the

• 47:56Liv Albert?

  There's so many stories of women having this trip.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  Well, she's a fraud, so she should, she should like get a punishment anyway. And the women of Athens banded together, came and tell the men, oh, oh, gosh, do I have it? Yes. The leading women came to the court and said, you are not husbands, but enemies, because you condemn her who discovered safety for us. Then the Athenians amended the law so that freeborn women, not slaves, apparently, could learn the art of medicine.

• 48:24Liv Albert?

  Don't be crazy.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  And I'm like, collective action on top of it. Huzzah. Like.

• 48:29Liv Albert?

  I wish that was, it's so hard because that's such a, that's a lovely story. I wish it wasn't written four to 500 years after classical Athens, or like after, I guess it might have only a couple hundred years if we're talking Alexandria being trained, but like,

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:44Liv Albert?

  You know, like I, I wish that was a story from Athens and not hygienists fabuli.

• 48:49Speaker 05

  I know. But you know, it's such an interesting story because again, it's going back to this point, like women are dying because of modesty. What do we mean by modesty? It is this social, cultural idea that again, the patriarchy has placed on women to behave a certain way so that the men know for sure that the children are theirs.

• 49:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's all it is. Like the whole, yeah, women staying at home, doing housework at its core is literally entirely just so men can be certain who their child is. And everything comes back to women, men being afraid of the womb. And that like, I can't unsee that. I don't like, it's literally, everything is about them. They're either afraid of the womb as a, the capabilities of the uterus and the body to create life. They are afraid of that, or they are afraid of women they can't have sex with. Like, that's like 90% of monsters in Greek mythology is just women, men can't fuck.

• 49:52Liv Albert?

  And yeah, like keeping them at home, it's the same thing. They're literally just afraid of the lack of control they have and the entire patriarchal structure under which we live is this perpetual grasp for control.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  Yep. And here's a woman, a mythological woman, we could even say, who's just like, you know what, I'm gonna do something for womankind so that maybe less of them will die. And it's definitely the way that hygienist tells the story. It's like, she's not just showing up to like women who are going through childbirth, like it's explained, the doctors are upset because the women are going to agnodyke with all their ills. And like, they even posit that the women are making up their illnesses so that they could, I don't know, hook up with this doctor or something.

• 50:41Liv Albert?

  For, okay, this is, this is a question I have for you, Christie, that's really for all the men who listen to my show. And the men who listen to my show and actually take this stuff in, I fucking love you. Thank you. And I want you to hear this question. Christie, how many times do you think in your life have you talked to another woman? And it has been about whether or not the doctor you get to see has been female?

• 51:03Liv Albert?

  For like any reason.

• 51:04Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 51:04Liv Albert?

  Like, how often do you think you mention or think about whether a doctor is female?

• 51:10Speaker 05

  All the time. I'm literally looking for a doctor right now.

• 51:13Liv Albert?

  Literally all the time because they listen more to us. They don't, yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, it's really interesting because I compare my experience like of my own health with my mom's. And I've been very fortunate in that for the most part, I've always had women doctors. And the few times I've had men doctors, whether it be like a therapist or just like a general practitioner or, you know, someone at the

• 51:43Speaker 05

  It always has made me feel not necessarily uncomfortable, but not fully taken care of, like not fully heard. And I've been really fortunate because I've had some health issues in the past that were handled in a way that I felt understood. And then I've listened to my mom's stories. You know, she gave birth and she's told me of experiences. I'm sorry, mom. I'm sharing these stories, but I don't think you care too much. She, when she was pregnant with my brother, I was a cesarean because umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck and chest. So like I couldn't be born the natural way. My brother was late and my mom didn't want to go through the excruciating experience of hours of labor. And she's just like, yeah, I'm just gonna do another cesarean. And her doctor kept trying to convince her.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  It's like, I don't want to rob you of the experience of child, like natural childbirth.

• 52:31Liv Albert?

  Ew.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yes. So there's that. The other one-

• 52:37Liv Albert?

  Was she allowed in the end? Sorry.

• 52:38Speaker 05

  Oh, she got a cesarean.

• 52:39Liv Albert?

  Fuck yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  My mom, my mom don't mess around.

• 52:42Liv Albert?

  Good.

• 52:43Speaker 05

  The other one is something that she experienced as a young woman that I also experienced. And I had this doctor, so I, I ended up with, um, I do have a tumor in one of my breasts, but it's not, it's not, uh, cancerous. But I was 20 when my female doctor pointed this like, hey, you got a lump here. We're gonna have to like look into it, all of this. And I was freaking out because I'm 20. I'm immortal at that point. Like, what?

• 53:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  And then I, I talked to my mom and she's like, oh yeah, I had a bunch of those and they were all removed. And my doctor told me it's because I had, I waited so late to have children.

• 53:19Liv Albert?

  Fuck off.

• 53:21Speaker 05

  And my mom, my mom had me at 29, which was probably late for the time, right?

• 53:26Liv Albert?

  My mom was 30 and I often thought she was older, but like, I honestly actually have heard like most of my friends have older parents than me. So like even that, like 29, being late.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  My mom was 29. I got the same, so it was the same thing at 20. Are you telling me at 20, I've waited too long to have children? Like that's, that's transitive logic happening there. But like, that's not what my doctor is saying to me, but that is, you know, a difference of 30 years of what doctors are saying to women.

• 53:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah. In the 20th century.

• 53:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:00Liv Albert?

  Like.

• 54:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, I hear horror stories all the time of like, you know, I don't want kids and I would love to get that fully handled. So I don't have to just even deal with any of the trouble, but like I the, the, the horror stories I've heard of, of women who have tried to like, yeah, it's just horrifying.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  Well, and so that I forgot to bring it up, that anecdote that Klegorn of the young woman. And the explanation is like, oh, women need to menstruate regularly to get rid of the excess blood because excess blood in the body makes you sick. I remember asking my class, it was great. I loved my like, um, history of medicine class because we had what I called, um, difficult conversations, uh, based on Idyllin articles and stuff. So we, I would have a class full of 20 year old men and women and everywhere in between, talking about menstruation, which was fascinating. Like it was really cool. Um, and, uh, kudos to like some of my male students in the class who were like there for their like, yeah, we'll make this happen.

• 55:03Liv Albert?

  It's sad though that you have to give that kudos, just to say that, because I agree. Like I was, I was about to be like, oh yeah, good for them. And then I'm like, oh my God, it's such basic fucking stuff. Like they, they do not deserve like props, but also like, I understand.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. And a lot of it was just kind of acknowledging like, yeah, the fact that we got separated at a health class and this stuff wasn't talked about as if it was taboo, as if it wasn't something that more than half the population experienced.

• 55:28Liv Albert?

  And which applies to the whole population.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 55:31Liv Albert?

  Guess what? You're not getting created without these issues.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  Well, I asked all of them, including the women, the young women in my class. Do women need to menstruate in order to be healthy? And this was with like a knowledge of like IUDs can actually stop menstruation, right?

• 55:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 05

  Perfectly fine.

• 55:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's not a big fucking deal.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  It's not. I had young women being like, well, yeah, I think you do because it cleans out.

• 56:00Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  And I'm like, these ideas are still sitting in the back of our heads.

• 56:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 05

  And, and this is why we have to talk about it. This is why we have to be open about it and not be taboo. And I, you know, that was the other part of like, another discussion was that scene from HBO's Rome, where like, everyone's just watching trepanation happen, right?

• 56:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  And like, on the one hand, we feel horrified at the thought of a crafts person has to show off his skill in front of the public. Because it's like, I don't know if I want a crowd of people watching as like, my head's getting drilled into, or for the sake of modesty, other body parts being revealed.

• 56:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  But on the reverse, the idea of a privacy between a singular doctor and a patient, leads to these issues of like, um, the doctor for the women's Olympic gymnastics team, who just gets to assault a woman after woman after woman, because privacy.

• 57:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  I don't know how I got on that tangent, other than like-

• 57:10Liv Albert?

  But no, it, but it, yeah, no, I mean, I guess I asked you about women doctors, because it is something that we think about all the time, about whether or not a doctor we're gonna see is a man or a woman, and how that will affect the treatment that we get. Like, I, just because we're on this realm of like, I think especially when it comes to female anatomy type stuff, like, yeah, we need to be talking about it more and more. I am thirty-six and just get, found out that I get the joy of going through very early perimenopause, which is like, so fun. And also even just perimenopause as a concept, has only very recently been talked about.

• 57:47Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 57:48Liv Albert?

  And it affects like, every single thing about your hormones and your body. And I'm thirty-six, and I get to have like, these pre-menopausal experiences, that like, literally no one talks about. The only reason I got any kind of real help is because I went to see a female naturopath, who was like, yeah, it's early, but like, you show these signs, try this, you know? And also, can I say, like- You know, and I mean, the Canadian healthcare system is free, but doesn't really exist. So, yeah, like I can't access like a regular doctor because I'm not allowed to pay for it, but also they won't give me one. So we're doing great as a country. I'm glad we're not going bankrupt, would like to have access to a doctor.

• 58:34Liv Albert?

  But, you know, so I saw this naturopath and the, she prescribed me an herbal supplement because I, it's too early for anything harder than that. I agree. You know, I don't want to actually fuck with my hormones. I'm very young still. But the, the herb that she prescribed, we call it now, we call it chaste tree. And I Googled, do you know it?

• 58:54Speaker 05

  No.

• 58:55Liv Albert?

  Okay, I, I am anticipating based on all of my research. I love it. So I, I was simultaneously like, so I've been writing a, a, a novel and I've been, I'm an enormous nerd, obviously. So everything I include, I've been trying to find like, you know, mythological connections, origins, whatever. Like I want to use as much like deep mythological and ancient Greek knowledge in this novel as I can, despite it being really smutty. But I was Googling the ancient Greek words for lavender and rosemary, just like completely separately.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:34Liv Albert?

  And I was finding like, oh yeah, you know, all these connections lavender, rosemary and, and, and then I found basically this herb that it's, is in the same family. It was sacred to Hera and the women took it for all of their like menstrual needs and menopausal stuff. And that is quite literally just the modern name of it. Now we call it chaste tree or Vivek's or something. There's like different names. It's all in that same family. It's literally sacred to Hera because of women's health and I get to take it today. And I think that it says so much about folk medicine.

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Liv Albert?

  One, because that's literally the only way that, that this herb is still being passed down as this option. But also how little we have done experimentally in terms of like actually solving these problems with modern medicine. Like we are, we are still relying on folk medicine for a lot of women's health stuff. Not necessarily because it works best, but because it is, we're not doing the work to give us medical advancements in that field.

• 1:00:38Liv Albert?

  Anyway, yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, yeah, like, it's, and I, one of the main reasons I posit, like, my imagining of America going into the field, I made a little novella about her, was that if she is of, um, like, free person status, or like, a former slave, it's like, I imagine, like, her mother, having been a slave, doesn't actually have own, like, I don't wanna say ownership, but like, she doesn't have control over her daughter.

• 1:01:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  Right? Um, something can happen to her daughter, um, and that's true of, like, all slave mothers, is like, your child can be taken away from you at any moment, because they're not yours.

• 1:01:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  And having then to have the power, because you can't, you can't, also, without bodily autonomy, you can't say no to sex, you can't say no to someone forcing you to have to.

• 1:01:34Liv Albert?

  Especially when they are prescribing sex for your issues.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. So the easiest way to subvert that is folk medicine, the knowledge of what plants can do, um, and it's really interesting, I learned this from, uh, the, uh, Deirdre Cooper Owens' book, Medical Bondage.

• 1:01:54Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, good title.

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  It's, it's a great book. I, I highly recommend it as well. I'll be reading an excerpt from that at some point, too. But she talks about how, like, there was folk knowledge that cotton trees in Africa worked as contraceptives in a certain way, like, you can consume it, it would help prevent pregnancy. And so, like, masters in, uh, uh, southern parts of the United States, like, assumed that women were trying to end their pregnancies with, like, you know, drinking turpentine and things like that. The women just chewed on the roots of the cotton plants they were forced to grow.

• 1:02:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 05

  Or, and pick. And that worked, to a certain extent, you know, it wasn't a hundred percent effective, but it was just one way of, of subverting this power, is this long history of folk medical knowledge.

• 1:02:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, that is, yeah, I mean, it's how women have done that for so long, and I can only imagine how much more, like, necessary and valued it became when it, when it came to, you know, the

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Liv Albert?

  The slave trade. I don't have a better, there's, there must be a better way of phrasing that now.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Liv Albert?

  But yeah, yeah. Wow. That's really interesting.

• 1:03:09Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. And, and so, yeah, I was going back to Agnadeke and I'm like, okay, if this is an atheological story, what is its or like, what is it the origin of exactly? Like, why did hygienists feel the need to tell this story? And I, you know, I wondered if it's in part like this weird reaction to Hippocratic medicine and, and women's health, because they're saying like, well, actually, women are dying. And until there's more women in the field of Hippocratic medicine, like, women are going to continue to die. They're going to continue to be harmed. Agnadeke reasserts women's authority, at least when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, even though her story suggests like she's helping with all sorts of illnesses that women are experiencing.

• 1:03:53Speaker 05

  And in some cases, being a woman could increase the likelihood of a patient submitting to their care. Like, again, like,

• 1:04:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 05

  A woman straight up refused the care of all the other doctors until Agnadeke revealed she was a fellow woman.

• 1:04:07Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, if a, if a scary looking dude is making me submit for something and he is, oh, my God. Yeah.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  And modesty tells you, you shouldn't be allowing a man, a man not of your husband or household,

• 1:04:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  digitally massaging your vagina, right? Like,

• 1:04:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  Probably shouldn't let that happen. Otherwise, you're going to face socio-cultural punishments.

• 1:04:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  For that. So like, women were left in such a terrible position with the introduction of Hippocratic medicine and just male practitioners.

• 1:04:42Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  Like, maybe, maybe they are developing things that are help, that would be helpful to women, but they're contending with these other cultural ideas that still put them at risk at the end of the day.

• 1:04:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  Um, so, yeah, and.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  I'm just trying to make sure I'm hitting. Uh, yeah, so Newton brings up this question where one drew the line between a Maya and a medicine nurse, the term he used, was a personal one, since there were no laws that defined either profession. Again, there's no board certification that you are this or this. It is almost choosing the title for yourself and why you make that choice. The more difficult question is whether medical attention by women, like Phenostrata is another female medical practitioner that's mentioned, was solely given to women, children and members of her household, or whether male, a male might seek her out. Like, that's kind of the question, right? Like, ultimately, you

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  have to submit to the care of someone you might view as inferior, which is like, a mind-boggling question of like, yeah.

• 1:05:49Liv Albert?

  I'm sure female doctors find that today all the fucking time. Like, I'm sure the stories are horrifying of men who won't listen to them.

• 1:05:58Speaker 05

  Like, or if it's your aunt who you've known, like, known all your life, who's your doctor? Like, exactly as Amelia Hilaria and, oh, gosh, who wrote, Aosonius Parentalia, loved his maternal aunt who was a doctor. Cared for me like a mother. I bet you he listened to her.

• 1:06:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  Because why not?

• 1:06:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  Is she someone you trust?

• 1:06:25Liv Albert?

  Exactly. Whereas, like, yeah, and that, for women, getting that rank of someone people trust is like, steps and steps and steps higher than a man. You know, like, the assumption is that this doctor is someone you can trust because he's a man and he's a doctor.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Liv Albert?

  But for a woman, a doctor, yeah, she has to, like, have all of these extra things in order to be trustworthy, or, or, yeah.

• 1:06:50Speaker 05

  And at the end, it's like, the Romans didn't trust the Greek doctors for other reasons. They're foreign, they're often of lower status. Like, that's where identity becomes such an interesting aspect of. This, this title, right? Of like, okay, you, you can claim this title. Anyone can claim this title. That doesn't dictate how good your practice is or who you get to practice on.

• 1:07:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 05

  So much of your, the rest of your social identity does impact that.

• 1:07:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Speaker 05

  And, um, so, you know, there's later Roman Hellenistic evidence that suggests some women also treated men, although social pressures and expectations would have restricted any services to only a few men. Again, it feels likely like particularly family men would respond well to that. But this is also, most of our evidence comes from urban spaces, right? If there's only one person in your entire town.

• 1:07:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 05

  Who knows how to like stitch you up or, you know, what routes to take to deal with pain or a headache or whatever? You don't care if they're male or female a majority of the time. That's the only choice you have available to you.

• 1:08:02Liv Albert?

  It's a good reminder of how much our knowledge of the ancient world is based in those urban spaces, but so specifically often, like, you know, obviously I think in ancient Greek and I, you know, so often it's like everything we know is from Athens. And so, you know, for all I can point out these horrifying structural issues of the patriarchy, you know, and they are valid. Like it is so nice to imagine that there were so many smaller towns, city, states, whatever, that didn't have the breadth of Athens and didn't have the longevity or, or they're just like their stories didn't get passed down because of all of those things. Like, and how many women were doing awesome things, you know, outside of a, a place like

• 1:08:47Liv Albert?

  Athens, which was so, and Rome, which were both so, so structurally patriarchal and so intentionally oppressive of women.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

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• 1:10:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's nice to be like, oh, I bet you they were off doing cool stuff in other places.

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  For sure. Like, that's why, you know, it seems so much more reasonable in my sight of central Sicily to be like, sure, a woman's practicing medicine here. Why not?

• 1:10:16Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:10:16Speaker 05

  It's literally like even in Sicilian standards, it's remote. Like, it's not on the coast, it's up in the mountains. Who are you gonna turn to?

• 1:10:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, Upsinseia, Marks and Secord, they write, "In antiquity, there's a recognition that patients had power and agency, whether in their ability to provide home healthcare, so you could provide your own medicine, their process for choosing and hiring a physician, or their acquiescence or disobedience to the physician's instructions." And I think that's something else that is kind of important to highlight is patients themselves have agency and how much they're willing to submit to a doctor. And, you know, again, with the example of Nassar and the women's gymnastics team, it's like... Medicine has been put on a pedestal more recently that people are more willing to give into

• 1:11:12Speaker 05

  this authority of this institution in ways that can actually be detrimental to their health.

• 1:11:19Speaker 05

  In fact, another common issue that many people experience is like if they know they fall into a category of the BMI scale that puts them at overweight or obese, then very often that was all their doctor will focus on.

• 1:11:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 05

  Instead of like actually just understanding.

• 1:11:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 05

  The symptoms you're experiencing in that moment. So what you can do is when a nurse asks you to step on a scale, you can refuse to do that. You can refuse to provide that information and be like, I don't want that to be a factor of consideration for my visit today.

• 1:11:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, because also like we're speaking generally here, but I mean, I think that the, the issue, this issue is very, very focused on women. The, the weight loss, it's a constant, like you see, like TikToks all the time, people just been, oh, have you thought about losing weight? Like, oh, my arm is swollen from this crazy wound and the doctor would be like, well, have you thought about losing weight? Like it's, yeah, it's fucking horrifying.

• 1:12:16Speaker 05

  Well, and that's the same thing that like people are cautioning now because women are always asked like, when was your last?

• 1:12:23Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  Period.

• 1:12:24Liv Albert?

  And now they can use that.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  You can refuse to give that information if again, it's not the reason that you are coming in for the concern of today.

• 1:12:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 05

  So like, and I think sometimes we forget that if like we are asked a question, we assume it's knowledge that our doctor needs. And that's not to say it's like weight is important in considerations of like how much medication you need.

• 1:12:49Liv Albert?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 05

  So it's like you have to be aware and balance that.

• 1:12:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's not like it's not ever necessary information and same with when was your last period, but like, yeah, what like it's likely not necessary information and it's one of those things that just gets asked.

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  Or like a lot of people listening was like, are you pregnant? And they can't trust when you say no.

• 1:13:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  Like more often than not, you're forced to be tested.

• 1:13:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  If you're pregnant or not, like, because again, pregnancy is also a strong consideration in how your doctor will treat you.

• 1:13:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:13:25Liv Albert?

  For so many reasons.

• 1:13:27Speaker 05

  It's, yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Speaker 05

  So, so the fun thing too is like often it's not just the individual who gets to make these decisions, these healthcare decisions, right? It's not a private interaction like we imagine a doctor's office today. The patient, their family and friends, and even the household might be involved. Like, you know, rich households by bringing their slaves and like, hey, I don't remember what I ate this week. What was on the menu? And like, so you might have different people in the household contributing to the diagnosis

• 1:13:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Speaker 05

  of an individual patient. They're also often involved in the care. It's really interesting that certain letters we get from the Roman, like Roman men, that shows just how much caring for a friend who is ill is actually really a big deal. That, that isn't given to slaves. Even though there's a sense of pollution, although there's the sense of danger of taking care of an ill person, a good friend is going to be at your bedside.

• 1:14:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Which is, which is cool to think about. Again, it's like this empowering aspect of being a patient. Like, you don't have to suffer.

• 1:14:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Speaker 05

  In a, in a, I don't know, sanitized medical space. Like, the care can look very different.

• 1:14:43Liv Albert?

  Can I make another?

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:14:45Liv Albert?

  Connection to the downfall of capitalism. So, yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why something like that sounds quite foreign to us today and like, is because an enormous part of the function of capitalism requires us to not be together and not be a community. It requires us to be separated. It's why they don't love mass transit. It's why there are always all of these ways to make it still about like, oh, you're still driving yourself all alone. And it's why like the sprawl is, and like the lack of walkable cities in North America,

• 1:15:28Liv Albert?

  like all of that is by design to keep us from forming close communities because that is the only way that capitalism and consumerism can control us is if we are lacking in those communities. Like if I saw something today where, you know, If if people if we can remain so consumed by consumerism, by individuality, by all of these things that are about like raising us as an individual above a collective community, like if that is all we as people are concerned with, that is that is how the

• 1:16:10Liv Albert?

  ruling class remains happy because we are not paying attention to anything else. And they can go on live TV and do Nazi salutes because we are more concerned with, you know, whether we have the newest Stanley Cup. That's so a dated reference because I don't have one. And also, again, I try not to be in that that level of the consumerist capitalism. So, but you know, it, it, yeah, like, that is a huge part of it. And it's why this nice thing of like, oh, they know that was like a thing that you did as a community. Like, that's why that sounds so foreign to us because capitalism requires that to be foreign to us in order to continue to maintain control.

• 1:16:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, there, there are times I like would tell my students like, man, doesn't that sound nice? Wouldn't it be nice if we went back to some of these practices that are thousands of years old? Because at the, at the end of the day, yeah, a lot of it is the community aspect of like, being willing to take care of each other. Because that's what medicine is at the end of the day.

• 1:17:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Or that's what it should be.

• 1:17:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. And Galen's pretty great. Galen gives us some different stories where like we learn how patient, family and friends can push back when they disagree with the physician's judgment, or if they're unhappy with the care given to their loved ones. Because at the end of the day, a patient decides if you're an actual doctor or not. They they decide if you get paid or not at the end of the day. So Galen tells the story of a patient who agreed to comply to like one of his instructions. But as soon as he left, the patient and his friends erupted in laughter and disdain with no intention of following his directions. And a lot of medical techs complain about patients just not listening to physicians. So again, the whole rise of Hippocratic medicine is in

• 1:18:01Speaker 05

  part to just legitimize them to give them authority and, you know, disparage their competition. Like, that's a constant fight they're having to.

• 1:18:11Speaker 05

  Have patients listen to them.

• 1:18:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  And so you saw the example from Domina, I sent you that clip.

• 1:18:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that one was so interesting.

• 1:18:21Speaker 05

  It's so good because it's a great, it's like you have Augustus's entire family sitting around him, ex-wife, daughter, heir apparent, wife. And the, most of Augustus's family has hired Musa, this Greek doctor who's like the best physician in Rome. And Livia has her own personal, like, she was a, this character was a former slave to Livia, trained in, again, what we might consider more like pharmacology, folk medicine, but like, just is very knowledgeable, right? And she was freed, but she still works for Livia in this patron-client relationship. And, and Musa and Livia's.

• 1:19:04Liv Albert?

  Antigone.

• 1:19:05Speaker 05

  Antigone, thank you. And Antigone have two very different ideas of how to treat Augustus, who's suffering with a fever from the plague. And you just see this fight break out and, you know, it's not just the considerations of like, the professional training of each individual, but also the fact that like Livia, at this point in time, has accusations of poison floating around because her first husband died very mysteriously.

• 1:19:35Liv Albert?

  Respect.

• 1:19:36Speaker 05

  Right. And that is, that is something the Romans are always concerned with is like, doctors can poison you. You don't know what they're giving you. And so there's all of this knowledge and these family dynamics that are dictating how Augustus's fever is going to be treated in this instance.

• 1:19:52Liv Albert?

  I do love, though, that they have the doctor, the man, going, no, he needs to remain hot. We, he can't be cool. Don't open a window. And then this, this woman who is, I mean, she's a Greek name, but I imagine that's, she's played by a black woman. I'm imagining she's like, probably unfortunately, like, was like, taken by a slave, as a slave by the Greeks, given a Greek name. And then to the Romans, horrifying. But I do love that, that the implication of her as a, a black woman, like, i- in this space is so interesting. And the way she's been like, no, like, cool him, he's burning alive. And they're like, no, no, let him burn.

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you know, that's against, I hear that about fevers now of, um, you know, a fever isn't necessarily, you don't necessarily want to get rid of a natural fever because that is your body fighting off infection of some kind. But at a certain point, when your fever gets too high

• 1:20:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Speaker 05

  and you're having febrile seizures and things like that, then you want to bring the temperature down.

• 1:20:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Speaker 05

  And so i- it's also this interesting mix of like cure, like cure of opposites versus cure of similarities.

• 1:21:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 05

  Playing out. So I love that scene. I was so excited when I got to see it.

• 1:21:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Speaker 05

  But we don't actually get scenes like that from the ancient world. We just can imagine it.

• 1:21:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Speaker 05

  So

• 1:21:12Liv Albert?

  And just to the listeners, I will link to that video because it is a really great scene and it's cut together well. So it's like four minutes and you just get to see the sort of what's happening there. Did you do that?

• 1:21:20Speaker 05

  No, it's someone else had it. Kudos to whoever that was. Thank you for doing that. I used it in a conference presentation.

• 1:21:26Liv Albert?

  Amazing. And I was like, this is perfect. I can see if, I'm curious if Christie did it herself.

• 1:21:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, um, so like, we don't necessarily have a scenario like that recorded in ancient history, but again, going to Deirdre, Deirdre Cooper Owens book, Medical Bondage, Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. She does have a story that really highlights how medical care is community practice and it's a consideration of multiple identities. So she gives a story, an anecdote that provides, uh, this into the question of identity and authority.

• 1:22:03Speaker 05

  And it tells the story of a former slave and midwife by the name of Mildred Graves. So this is, this is from her book. While enslaved, she labored for decades as a nurse and midwife in Hanover, Virginia for her owner, Mr. Tinsley. Graves serviced both black and white women because of her reputation as an exemplary accouchere and doctoring woman. She remembered a particularly traumatic episode when her owner sent her to assist Mrs. Leek, a pregnant white patient who was experiencing a protracted labor. Upon reaching Leek, Graves encountered two doctors from Richmond there to assist with the child's delivery. The doctors informed Graves that they were unable to help Leek. So this is what Graves supposedly said.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  Graves responded, "I could bring her around." As the bond woman later recalled, "The doctors laugh at me and say, 'Get back, Darkey. We mean business and don't want any witch doctors or hoodoo stuff.'" Leek, however, so the woman who's pregnant, insisted that Graves deliver her baby, and the midwife did so successfully.

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  And the doctors, in the end, the doctors who had ridiculed her ended up offering her praise for the successful delivery.

• 1:23:13Liv Albert?

  Well, of course, they do after the fact, because then they try to make it seem like they were fucking keen on it the whole time.

• 1:23:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Liv Albert?

  Men love to take credit after the fact.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  And I just love, like, here is this entire history, once again, of framing women's healthcare practices as something witchy or hoodoo.

• 1:23:32Liv Albert?

  Doctoring woman. Instead of just fucking doctor. Like, are we kidding?

• 1:23:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, but what I love is, like, Mrs. Leek said, like, "You dumbasses can't do anything. Let her in. She is known in my community of helping women." And, and, you know, that's also further supported by her, her former master, who, you know, sends her out into the community and be like, "Hey, my former slave knows what she's doing."

• 1:24:05Liv Albert?

  Oh, she freed at this point, at least?

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  She is freed.

• 1:24:07Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:24:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. But she still has this, this interesting patron-client, really, which makes sense, right? Like, how do you, just because you're free, if there's no social structure?

• 1:24:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 05

  That allows you to make money, you kind of have, that, that's a common problem that even Roman slaves is like,

• 1:24:22Liv Albert?

  I was gonna say, yeah, I know this from Rome as well.

• 1:24:23Speaker 05

  Leave.

• 1:24:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 05

  You are dependent on net, on social networks for a living.

• 1:24:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  So that's, you know, you have the authority of a former male slave owner sending out one of his laborers.

• 1:24:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  And so you have kind of the authority of that, but you also have the decision of the patient herself saying, like, "Hey, you can do anything. Let her in and help me." And like, I just love that there actually exists this perfect anecdote of like, how identity and community all play into these decisions of like, how we receive healthcare. And we know that that one's true, like, that one happened.

• 1:25:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:06Liv Albert?

  That's, oh, it's, yeah, it's so interesting. It's good that it's interesting alongside being so horrifying.

• 1:25:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I, what my most recent paper was going on, it's like, okay, if people are going to listen to a female doctor, because they, you know, they don't always listen to male doctors as they're quick to point out. It's like, man, a good patient just shuts up and takes it, whatever we tell them to do. Um, so what, you know, what do women have to do in order to be viewed as authorities? So one is practicing like a men, like actually knowing Hippocratic medicine seems to be an aspect.

• 1:25:46Speaker 05

  And so based on medical writers like Serenus, uh, women who practice medicine are also encouraged to have or exhibit manly qualities that include endurance, rationality, and the equanimity of men. I loved that. Quote, well, it's like, whatever that means.

• 1:26:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. But on the flip side, what probably makes women appealing as doctors is this maternal aspect, because that's something I see a lot in both the literature with Venus as a mother taking care of Aeneas, of Amelia Hilaria helping take care of her nephew. Um, we see this in epigraphs as well of like, women are very maternal and caring. Like that is viewed as already feminine in nature. And so, uh, we actually have this quote from Hippocrates' opera of the Corpus Medicorum, Gracorum, which is just basically.

• 1:26:42Liv Albert?

  So many Latin words to say, yeah, the Greek.

• 1:26:47Speaker 05

  The Greek, uh, texts we have on medicine, we get the following recommendations of, you know, how you should be treating your patients. For there's not much difference between medicine and wisdom. And in fact, everything in medicine pertains to elements in wisdom. It possesses freedom from greed, reverence, a sense of shame, modesty and dress, good repute, judgment, conviction, quiet, cleanliness, thoughtfulness, knowledge of the things that are useful and necessary for life.

• 1:27:16Speaker 05

  The absence of impurity, freedom from superstition, and divine dignity for the features they have in the face of licentiousness, quackery, greed, lust, thievery, and shamelessness. So this is what they're saying is like, this is what makes for a good doctor. And later on, we also get dictate what this is how they say doctors should interact with their patients. Dictate what must be done in a friendly and gentle way while turning the person away from their circumstances. At the same time, rebuke sharply and strictly with attention and care. Soften what details you must while revealing nothing of what will happen next or what threatens them. For because of this, namely because of the disclosure just mentioned of what threatens

• 1:27:59Speaker 05

  or what will be next, many people have taken a poor turn. They're just explaining bedside manner and it sounds like a parent-child relationship, right? Like soften what you can so they're not scared, but be firm enough that they'll follow your directions.

• 1:28:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, you know, that just makes me think that that's kind of right up a mother, right? A mother of a household, running a household, that's what she does every day. And she kind of already has those qualities.

• 1:28:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Speaker 05

  In that role, so it can translate, you know, the doctors are here saying, yeah, that should translate really well to how doctors interact with their patients.

• 1:28:43Liv Albert?

  Duh.

• 1:28:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Speaker 05

  And I love how it's like, but they must be rational. Like there's this sense of like, but what?

• 1:28:54Speaker 05

  That's what's interesting about the epigraphs is like these women who are named Medica, and especially if their epigraphs are written by men, like husbands or, or some other members. It's like despite your sex, despite your gender, you actually practice medicine really well. Like you're practicing it in this male way that we find acceptable.

• 1:29:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So like even when they acknowledge these like kind of feminine aspects that would do really well, that would like really behoove, uh, which is a word I've been jokingly using a lot. It would really behoove the doctors, um, like they can't, they still have to be like, but. Keep it manly, because rationale is manly.

• 1:29:32Speaker 05

  Keep the male energy up.

• 1:29:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and meanwhile, the male energy that they explain is just like, human energy. But they're like, no, no, this is the man's. You can't get too lady about it. Not too many hugs.

• 1:29:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And so, so, um, so practices of medicine like a man has these maternal qualities. And the last big one is chase. Like, it's really interesting that that becomes a major factor. So physicians in the Roman period, again, were often susceptible to accusations of licentiousness. And they're hitting on the women, apparently.

• 1:30:11Speaker 05

  But why would they be as concerned with medica? Like, are you worried about women doing that too? Maybe they are. Maybe the men are frightened.

• 1:30:22Liv Albert?

  I mean, they're very afraid of sexual women, so I would not be surprised.

• 1:30:26Speaker 05

  They are very, but like, with female patients, are they? I don't know.

• 1:30:30Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  Right? So, one reason may be due to rational medicine's attempt to denigrate other healthcare practices. So like folk medicine being associated with women, and then gets associated with witchcraft as a result.

• 1:30:47Speaker 05

  Witches are often portrayed as obsessed with things of the body. They are driven largely by bodily lust. Like Apuleius's Meroe and Pamphylae and Fotis. So like, yes, women can be hypersexualized. Furthermore, the witch's lust is considered so overpowering that it can cause male impotence. So yes, can be dangerous to their male patients. As such, a female medical practitioner, especially one versed in folk remedies, could be just as dangerous to her patient as a male counterpart. Claiming chastity is one way, a significant aspect of appearing professional.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  There's another interesting consideration, though, of why maybe chasteness was an important quality that women had to exude. And it's the fact that a lot of them are of former slave status. So. At least that's true in Western Rome.

• 1:31:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 05

  Um, as a slave, even with specialized skill, a medica would have the stigma of being sexually available.

• 1:31:49Liv Albert?

  Ugh.

• 1:31:50Speaker 05

  Right? And her chastity would easily come into question. Legally, the former owner, now patron, no longer had the right of life and death over an ex-slave, nor could they claim total control of an ex-slave's labor and goods. But the relationship between former slave and master shaped the freed slave's behavior to the patron's advantage. What is evident, however, is that freed women were no longer obligated to provide sexual services to their former master as a form of opere. That's like this weird requirement that you give some labor to your former slave master. Um, so.

• 1:32:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  I know.

• 1:32:24Liv Albert?

  Sorry, there's so much happening in there.

• 1:32:27Speaker 05

  But there's a lot. But if you think about it, right? If a lot of these women are freed persons or of slave status, there is an assumption of sexual availability.

• 1:32:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it was more when you, I didn't, the sort of like, oh, they also have to perform labor for their.

• 1:32:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:32:45Liv Albert?

  Ex-master despite being quote unquote free. But oh, but that's not, doesn't have to be the sex, though. So.

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, at least not, and that is put legally. Like, that is something that women legally are no longer obligated. Once they are considered a Roman citizen, they have legal protections for that.

• 1:33:01Liv Albert?

  Great. The bar is low?

• 1:33:04Speaker 05

  Bar is low. Um.

• 1:33:06Liv Albert?

  Good. Yay.

• 1:33:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. But even if that is the case, the stigma of the medica's former slave status could impact her reputation as a professional medical practitioner.

• 1:33:16Liv Albert?

  Well, as you know, also, having too much sex makes you less smart. That's just a fact for ladies only.

• 1:33:22Speaker 05

  That's true. Everything in moderation.

• 1:33:24Liv Albert?

  No, the men.

• 1:33:24Speaker 05

  Moderation. At least that applies to men, too. Men who have too much sex with women, like, what are you on, man?

• 1:33:32Speaker 05

  You like your wife a little too much there, sir.

• 1:33:34Liv Albert?

  Imagine if we stigmatized men for having too much sex.

• 1:33:39Speaker 05

  We try and it doesn't work.

• 1:33:42Liv Albert?

  No, because they've done too much damage on the other side.

• 1:33:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Liv Albert?

  And also because we're not doing it seriously because it doesn't fucking matter.

• 1:33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, so there's something interesting that we see with the medical profession. So remember how I mentioned earlier that a lot of freed slaves often maintain a patron-client relationship with their former slave master because that is the social network.

• 1:34:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 05

  They have access to that allows them to make an income now that they've been freed.

• 1:34:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 05

  There's not really any other social safety nets for them. It's really interesting to note that medical practitioners, what we see in the epigraphic evidence, tend to leave the households in which they were formerly enslaved.

• 1:34:27Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  Possibly, and you know, this is just my hypothesis, possibly they're doing that to get away from this reputation of being sexually available. They're promoting this chase aspect, which is very important to doctors because the biggest insult thrown at them is they're sleeping with the women and killing the men with poison.

• 1:34:49Speaker 05

  So, I mean, that's, I thought that was just in a really interesting pattern.

• 1:34:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  This comes from Sandra Joschel. She notes that of fourteen inscriptions that name an upper-class employer or household, none of the freedmen's former servitude or familia, five were nurses, six were doctors, and the other three were a cook, a procurator or manager, and an architect. So like, we don't have a lot of examples, but the ones we do predominantly are in the healthcare profession.

• 1:35:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's interesting. It makes sense. Yeah.

• 1:35:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, ah, yeah, I, so that's why women are always kind of have these qualities when you look at their epigraphs, if they're medica, practicing medica. Those are kind of the ones they highlight a majority of the time.

• 1:35:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:36Speaker 05

  Sometimes if they're usually of slave status, they will literally just have their name and their profession and who they belonged to. So that might suggest they weren't as...

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, they weren't, they didn't necessarily receive freed status, so they didn't have a lot of money. They didn't get a lot of prestige. Um, but they're still present and someone acknowledged them. That was an important part of who they were.

• 1:36:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  So, yeah.

• 1:36:06Liv Albert?

  Um, I, just for like a slightly lighter, because I, in hearing all of this talk, um, about, you know, the, just the freed status, because I think it's also, it's really important to remember that because I think we have this idea that freedom was freedom, because they called it that, but, um, it reminds me of another, another place where freedom is valued and yet where nobody is really particularly free. I wonder where that would be. Um, you definitely don't live there, just to like, in case I'm not being obvious enough.

• 1:36:34Speaker 05

  I live in the state of denial, so.

• 1:36:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, you know, freedom. What does that actually mean? But no, I think it's a really good reminder, just generally, like outside of the Medica aspect of like what it meant to be quote unquote freed. Um, then and now, uh, yeah, it's really interesting. And, um, but the, sorry, I realized the original thought of this was, uh, it just brings me back to having read, um, the Wolf Den trilogy, Eddie Harper's. Yeah. And I think she handled that's in such an interesting way, where you got to kind of see what that looked like, because, you know, spoiler, but not really, because it's just the first of three books, but like, the main character is freed from, uh, like sex work, from prostitution,

• 1:37:21Liv Albert?

  um, in, in, in ancient Pompeii, and you get to look at what that looks like and how she kind of ends up becoming a slave her, or a master herself. And also like is still beholden to these people. And it's just like a really, it's an interesting kind of examination of that without. I don't want to say without all the darkness because like also it's literally about

• 1:37:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Liv Albert?

  prostitution in Pompeii.

• 1:37:43Speaker 05

  I've read the first book. It's dark. Yeah.

• 1:37:45Liv Albert?

  Oh, if you've not read the second one, the second one, well, the all three are great. Elodie is fricking lovely. The first one is dark, exactly, which is, but my brain is going to the second two, which get lighter, but are just still really interesting. But the, yeah, the trilogy generally is a really, really interesting kind of examination on Roman slavery and also Roman, you know, freed people and, and the status that they held because it certainly, it wasn't like they just were freed and then became equals, much like the States, much like the American slavery, which I just, yeah, yeah, you know, but, oh, but, oh, it's, it's, we don't need DEI because everyone's the same, colorblind.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Well.

• 1:38:30Liv Albert?

  Sorry.

• 1:38:30Speaker 05

  No, no, I just, yeah, we're gonna keep coming back to it. Like, that's, that's the reality. And I, I'm, I'm at my conclusion. My conclusion is not short, but I'm at my conclusion.

• 1:38:45Speaker 05

  So, so in conclusion, why should you care about Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine?

• 1:38:53Speaker 05

  Eleanor Claigorn, again, her book Unwell Women, The Transmission of Ancient Greek Medical Ideas About Women's Defective Bodies and Delirious Temperaments Meant That the Middle Ages Continued to be Dominated by the Dimmest Views of Female Biology. In the Coming Centuries, as, as new learning was layered upon the old, the punitive and oppressive mythologies of the wandering womb would continue to shape attitudes towards women's susceptibility to illness, their bodies, and their lives. Just as the development of medicine and healthcare sits at the heart of social progress, it all, it has always been deeply political too, which is, I think, what we've been saying this entire time.

• 1:39:30Liv Albert?

  I don't know. I don't know that I've been commenting on politics.

• 1:39:33Speaker 05

  Not at all. Not at all. And, you know, just to highlight some more of the politics. Also, well, I'll come back to this in a moment.

• 1:39:43Speaker 05

  I, one thing I learned teaching the, the history of medicine. Hippocrates was in fact written about as part of the original Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision. And there's an article in Idylland by Tara Mulder that investigates this fully. Because one of the Hippocratic Oath's lines says, "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan. And similarly, I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion." And the reason it got brought up in Roe versus Wade was just, uh, one of the guys was asking, hang on, make sure.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  Did I have that down? Basically, he was just asking, it's like, huh, why were they so concerned with it way back then? And he quotes a different scholar that interprets that line because as I have talked about, Hippocrates probably didn't author the oath because he was practicing,

• 1:40:47Speaker 05

  teaching people medicine for money and not keeping it in the family.

• 1:40:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And he wasn't writing it down in that way. He was just doing it.

• 1:40:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so he talks about how this might be, it was most definitely preserved, but like it represents other ideas in natural philosophy and Pythagoreanism, something along those lines. So all of that is documented in the original Roe versus Wade decision and had some impact on that decision.

• 1:41:16Speaker 05

  I would posit also that it's like, maybe that was included in the Hippocratic Oath because it was one instance where male doctors were recognizing, "We shouldn't mess with that. We should leave that to the women." Because as Agnotikey's story told us, it's like, women were dying in childbirth, especially when male doctors were involved. So maybe it wasn't so much a prohibition against life. It was just an acknowledgement of like, maybe we leave this one to the ladies.

• 1:41:46Liv Albert?

  Maybe it's up to the person whose body it is to determine what goes on with around in from that fucking body.

• 1:42:00Liv Albert?

  Maybe we don't need, maybe we just let people decide what their bodies do and do not do because it has nothing to do with the state.

• 1:42:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:14Liv Albert?

  And anyway, abortion is healthcare, abortion is healthcare, abortion is healthcare.

• 1:42:20Speaker 05

  Yes, and you know, why do we still care that Hippocratic medicine was androcentric from the Gecko? As of July twenty twenty four, an article from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, released an article titled Significant Lack of Data and Research on Chronic Conditions Affecting Women Is Hindering Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prevention. Report Calls For Enhanced NIH Research Effort. And what has happened in the last week?

• 1:42:52Speaker 05

  All NIH research has been paused. All grants in the United States have been paused. People, not just women, people aren't receiving cancer treatment because they're in part of cancer treatment experimental programs. Because we have now found a problem. Women are absent from medical knowledge and we need to be funding and putting money into learning about them to improve the system.

• 1:43:22Liv Albert?

  And it took only twenty eight hundred years.

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Liv Albert?

  And it's still not happening.

• 1:43:30Speaker 05

  And it's, it's, it is, it was, there, there was a great medical social justice movement to get more women included, to get other marginalized populations more included in studies. And it's coming to a standstill now.

• 1:43:47Liv Albert?

  I mean, I also know, yeah, like, they've also paused notifying, or like, the, I assume it would be CDC, but I feel like it.

• 1:43:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, CDC communications.

• 1:43:59Liv Albert?

  Right, CDC communications.

• 1:44:00Speaker 05

  With bird flu going around.

• 1:44:02Liv Albert?

  Well, and tuberculosis is overtaking Kansas.

• 1:44:05Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:44:05Liv Albert?

  Tuberculosis.

• 1:44:07Speaker 05

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:44:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so that's, that's one side of the problem, right? Like, the actual funding needed to make a more holistic

• 1:44:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:22Speaker 05

  healthcare practice is paused.

• 1:44:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Speaker 05

  For who knows how long.

• 1:44:28Liv Albert?

  Keep filling your cabinet with white Christian nationalists.

• 1:44:31Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. The other side of it is my, my own research into women's experience with ancient healthcare practices. The work of all of these people I've been quoting would not be possible without research and scholarship developed through critical race theory, gender studies, queer theory, and disability studies. Trump has ordered the ending of DEI programs for agencies and stakeholders, but that will translate into any institution receiving federal funding.

• 1:45:02Speaker 05

  Um, so in anticipation of this, my alma mater, the University of Iowa, uh, is planning to close its 50-year-old Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Department of American Studies, both of which are replete with the kinds of courses and content that have been the recent target of Republican, Regent, and lawmaker ire. And it is kind of a smart move. They're, they're trying to relabel it. And so as my understanding is, is like, the courses themselves are being kept.

• 1:45:31Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:45:31Speaker 05

  But they're being hidden away to an extent to hopefully not be targeted. Um, so the, they're creating a new school of social and cultural analysis, and it's going to include the African-American studies, American studies, gender and women's and sexuality studies, Jewish studies, Latina studies, Native or Latina, Latino, Kenx, whatever. I don't mean whatever in that regard.

• 1:45:56Liv Albert?

  I get it.

• 1:45:57Speaker 05

  And Native American indigenous studies. All the marginalized knowledge.

• 1:46:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Speaker 05

  Is just being, either it's being hidden away, so it wouldn't be targeted further, or where I was teaching, they're completely gone.

• 1:46:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  So, once I left my institution, um, all the minor programs I was teaching in were removed, and that include archaeology, classical studies, gender studies, and medical humanities, which was geared towards students on the medical tract, so that they could learn about all of the problems historically that existed in their discipline. And how they might be able to address that going forward is now gone.

• 1:46:35Liv Albert?

  Well, here's the thing, um... It feels like the most cliche thing to say in the whole world, but it is also the most true right now, which is that those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. But like, we, we are watching history repeat itself right now. We are watching the devaluation of the study of history, the study of, and I, when I say history in that realm, I mean, like everything you were just talking about, because all of it ultimately falls under that category, right? I mean, basically all of like the study of arts and humanities, like we are studying the past. That's what I mean by history. We are studying the stuff that came before in all of its varied ways.

• 1:47:20Liv Albert?

  And when you do that, you inherently learn to, to recognize when it, it is repeating and, and they don't want that because if they're teaching people to recognize what a Nazi is, then when they see a man on television do a Nazi salute, they'll know what it is. And, and, and I, like, I don't even know how to finish that sentence because it's just so unbelievable that I've said it.

• 1:47:50Speaker 05

  I mean, that's, that was again, me, this conversation, because I've been just so engrossed in it for so long. I felt like, oh man, I'm, I'm just really presenting simplified knowledge, like there's nothing new and exciting here. But like talking to you is like, yeah, it is.

• 1:48:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08Speaker 05

  Of course it is.

• 1:48:09Liv Albert?

  And it's so necessary. It's so necessary, no matter how much you think it's simplified, but I think that that's what work like this is good for. I don't want to say my show, but I do mean it in just the way of like, I, I, I'm really grateful I'm able to put these conversations out there and, and, and share them with people. So that's why, that's what I mean when I say my show. But I think it is so important because people want to learn this and so often they either can't, you know, study for, you know, money reasons, or now they can't study because we're not allowing them to study the past. And I think. That for all I think that it's going to affect my own personal mental health immensely, like I don't, I just want to keep, like, I just think we need all of this now more than ever,

• 1:48:54Liv Albert?

  and we need to be talking about it. We need to be looking at these, what might be simplified versions of stuff. We need to still be putting it out there because learning a simplified version of this type of history and this type of knowledge is so much better than nothing. It's so, so, so, so, so much better than not knowing at all.

• 1:49:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I, I'm very much looking forward to reading Unwell Women.

• 1:49:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Speaker 05

  I do recommend it. What I, and I haven't read the whole thing yet, but what was blowing my mind is this over 400-page book, only 10 are dedicated to the time period that I study.

• 1:49:36Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:49:37Speaker 05

  And my, I, it makes perfect sense because her approach to what I believe most of the chapters are, is looking at medical texts. Well, if all you have to go on is the Hippocratic Corpus for understanding women's health in the ancient world, you're only going to get 10 pages worth.

• 1:49:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Speaker 05

  Um, and yes, I agree with you wholly. It's like what you do for your podcast is going to be so important going forward. And sadly, it's, early career scholars like myself no longer have the time, resources, or institutional support to look at other lines of evidence, for example, of women's and other marginalized bodies' healthcare experience. Like, we are losing people doing this research. Um, that's not going to stop us from trying and doing what we can to like, get that information out. Um, but it's, it's scary. And I was really thankful for the opportunity to come back and revisit this conversation because...

• 1:50:42Speaker 05

  I'm screaming into the void and hopefully people are listening.

• 1:50:45Liv Albert?

  Thank fuck it's not a void. That is the greatest part about this show and my job and my listeners. Like it's not a void and thank fuck. And I, yeah, I'm so glad that people want to hear these conversations. And I mean, I'm thrilled you wanted to come back because this was, while it was one of the most depressing two episode parts I've ever recorded, it was also one of the most fun because you're a delight.

• 1:51:10Speaker 05

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:51:10Liv Albert?

  Even when you're telling me terrible fucking things.

• 1:51:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. I also taught a turning point in world history course and the theme was mass killing events. I was like, my classes were a joy. Oh, man. But important, so important. And like, man, one of the, one of the events I taught was Rwanda genocide. And oh, boy, is there some stuff happening now related to that, too? It's, it's a bonkers world out there and.

• 1:51:41Liv Albert?

  The West has done so much damage. And then we just sit back and we say, oh, look at all these countries. They're just making a mess of themselves.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, on a lighter note, on my podcast, we talk about, uh, the ancient world and pop media.

• 1:52:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I've talked about Gladiator and apparently told a story about, uh, my knowledge of Elvish from the Fellowship of the Ring movie, uh, more than once. So check those out.

• 1:52:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, and like, it's a good time, too. We have a lot of stuff, uh, related more to Greek mythology. We spent like two seasons on Rome and apparently like Greek mythology is on the up and up because we covered Hades two. Uh, next episode coming out is on the return. Uh, we're going to be talking about.

• 1:52:33Liv Albert?

  Couple of guests from my show, a few, right? Three. Yeah. Three past guests.

• 1:52:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, uh, Epic the Musical, uh, we covered chaos, uh, like a lot of good Greek myth content out there to, uh, explore. I think we're doing Lore Olympus at some point, too. So.

• 1:52:49Liv Albert?

  Amazing. Yeah. You guys are doing all of the, I get asked about pop culture so often and I don't. I mean, I don't have the time, but also like I just, I thrive on, on the, the other side of it. And I am so glad that I have like friends who have a show and I can be like, hey, go listen to these very smart people talking about this show. And also I get to go on it instead of actually doing it myself, which I love.

• 1:53:13Speaker 05

  And we're, we're a fun bunch. Like

• 1:53:15Liv Albert?

  Oh, absolutely. You guys are the best.

• 1:53:16Speaker 05

  We, uh, we, we come with drinks made from Liv's cocktail.

• 1:53:20Liv Albert?

  Heck, yeah. And also I realized we've been talking about this and we have it's the name of your podcast. It's a movies we dig.

• 1:53:26Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Movies we dig. And a lot more than that. We, we cover TV shows, Superbowl commercials, musicals, video games. We will, will strangely enough, not books.

• 1:53:39Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 1:53:39Speaker 05

  Apparently we ain't got time to read.

• 1:53:41Liv Albert?

  But you know what? Like, respect. As someone who has to read also too much for their job, like you can't then sit down for novels, unfortunately, much these days. Or I find I can't read much Greek mythology novels because all I do is look into the Greek mythology and history all day, every day. But then after like a long day or on the weekend, I'm like, I'm sorry, guys, I'm not picking up a story about myth. Cause then my brain just turns it into work.

• 1:54:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh yeah. We, I, we're covering archaeology in film this season. So I have to turn off most of the time, my archaeology brain, my historian brain and my reception brain to enjoy anything.

• 1:54:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, um, I mean, thank you, Kristy, for coming back on. I mean, it really was so much fun. I was so glad. It's so funny because we planned this before we fully realized. We were just like, oh, like, yeah. It was like, oh, I'd love to have you back on the show. Yeah. Truly. It was, it was so unintentional. Like to the listeners, like we were just chatting about a bunch of other, you know, plans and schemes we have together. And I was like, well, you should come back on the show. Cause like, it would be nice to also get content out of having a fun conversation with you. Um, and then, and then we, then, then the inauguration happened and we sat down on that Friday and we both were like,

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

  This one's gonna hit close to home.

• 1:55:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And then two hours later, we were like, actually, we need to pause and, um, take this back up for another two hours next week.

• 1:55:10Speaker 05

  Yep, yep.

• 1:55:12Liv Albert?

  But oh my God, I'm so glad we did. This has been fucking terrifyingly insightful. Thank you so much.

• 1:55:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And, and people who are listening, you know, you want to hear more about ancient medicine? Let Liv know, let me know, because there's

• 1:55:26Liv Albert?

  We have some ideas.

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  I had a nineteen page timeline and it wasn't enough.

• 1:55:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, let us know, because we have some ideas. So you know, we have some ideas.

• 1:55:39Liv Albert?

  Um, do you want to tell the listeners, you know, other than your wonderful podcast, Movies We Dig, where they might find more from you or read more?

• 1:55:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, probably the best place to find me is on Blue Sky, under the handle at Vogue Archaeology, Vogue like the magazine, uh, dot B Sky dot social. Um, I spend the majority of my time there, parading both as myself and as Movies We Dig. Um, we, I try to keep my, the Movies We Dig, one, we try to keep very lighthearted, so like, just the pop culture stuff. Um, if you need a, a palate cleanser from doom scrolling, um, that's the best place to find us. Also, I've put up some of my conference presentations on YouTube under the same handle. So if you want to see a more academic, I guess, approach to this topic, um, you can check those out as well.

• 1:56:29Liv Albert?

  Amazing. And I'm going to try to remember to put some of those books, uh, you've been reading and recommending into the episode's description, too, just in case people are looking for more.

• 1:56:37Speaker 05

  I think, I think a majority are included in the works cited.

• 1:56:38Liv Albert?

  Oh, right, of course. Yes, you have a perfect. I love it. I love it.

• 1:56:44Liv Albert?

  Uh, well, thank you again. Um, I'm sure you'll be back. That's, that's me saying stuff that I, we know that the truth behind it.

• 1:56:51Speaker 05

  For sure. For sure. Thank you for having me.

• 1:57:10Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so much for listening. As always, you can find references to the books Christie has listed in the episode's description, as well as a link to her podcast Movies We Dig, which again, is joining the Memory Collective network. And still stay tuned for more on everything that is going on with that. We're building it slowly, basically just in whatever time we can scrounge up, because we're doing it without any funding, but I think that's good. It means we can do what we want and, and really make this into something that will benefit

• 1:57:49Liv Albert?

  both the creators and the educators and everyone who wants to learn and, and be entertained by learning about some really important aspects of history that often are kind of, if not forgotten entirely, then told in this way that is exclusionary to so many of us. And I think we need to be, you know, rewriting that, re-understanding it from this other perspective. And so, again, stay tuned for more, so that I don't keep rambling. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Penguish is the Hermes to my Olympians, the producer. She is utterly wonderful. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective

• 1:58:32Liv Albert?

  network of podcasts, and also just the Memory Collective. Again, stay tuned for more, but you can read some things now at collectivemem, that's just M-E-M, dot com. And yeah, yeah, stay tuned, stay tuned for more. We will have more. And sign up for our newsletter at mythsbaby.com/newsletter to stay, to, to, to stay up to date on, on all of that, both my book announcements and the, the Memory Collective itself. I have spent every day this week with that on my to-do list, to do this newsletter, to give you all this information. And one day, I will find the time

• 1:59:15Liv Albert?

  to get to it. So until then, you can just sign up, mythsbaby.com/newsletter.

• 1:59:22Liv Albert?

  Thank you all. I am Liv and I love this shit so much, even when it's horribly depressing because if we learn about it, we can understand it and we can hopefully find a way to stand up to the fascist governments overtaking the world.

• 1:59:43Liv Albert?

  Eat the rich. Billionaires are inherently immoral. And if it looks like a Nazi salute and it smells like a Nazi salute, it's probably a Nazi salute.

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• 2:02:03Liv Albert?

  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.

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• 2:02:31Liv Albert?

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