BONUS RE-AIR Conversations: Othering Women in the Origins of Western Medicine w/ Dr Christie Vogler (Parts 1 and 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 https://open.acast.com/networks/67a2a8858d79caff8e7693ee/shows/67a1934c95d7c2516aeb49a7/episodes/movieswedig.com, now part of the Memory Collective https://open.acast.com/networks/67a2a8858d79caff8e7693ee/shows/67a1934c95d7c2516aeb49a7/episodes/collectivemem.com podcast network! Pre-order Liv's Odyssey adaptation (!!!), The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! 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.

• 0:43Speaker 01

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• 1:39Liv Albert?

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

• 2:24Liv Albert?

  women in varied ways. And so-

• 2:28Liv Albert?

  This conversation, if you can believe it, is fucking fascinating. It's also only part one because we talked for an hour and a half and only got through half of what we wanted to say. And it's really good and really powerful. I can't wait for you to hear both parts. But I have to share that since we recorded this on January 24th, which is just like really relevant because we were both slightly unhinged. Um, you know, we'd, we'd just watched a Nazi salute performed, uh, it, it at an inauguration. Um, and, and everything else that, that happened over the like three days, um, in between us recording and, and the fascist inauguration into the United States. Um, and so it's just like

• 3:13Liv Albert?

  there's, there's a lot happening here. But Christie, um, is also, uh, the host of one, or one of the hosts of the podcast Movies We Dig, which I have been on a couple of times. It's a really fun show with a bunch of historians and archaeologists who break down movies featuring the ancient world. And it's really fun. It's mostly about kind of appreciation and understanding the reception of it. Um, but that's all to say, Movies We Dig is going to be the second podcast, joining my new, um, collective slash podcast network. So more on this to come. I mentioned it a little bit on Tuesday, but Michaela and I

• 3:55Liv Albert?

  are founding something called Nemasyne or The Memory Collective. And that is going to be a collective of people like us and like Christie and like the wonderful people behind Sweetbitter that I mentioned on Tuesday, people who are trying to look and, uh, share history with the public that is recognizing the impact that the patriarchal structure has had on that history in varied ways. You can find more information at collectivemem.com. I couldn't get Memory Collective or Collective Memories. Collectivemem, M E M, dot com. I'll link in the episode's description. You can find more information about what we're

• 4:37Liv Albert?

  doing, but we're starting with a kind of a podcast network, bringing in some people doing interesting stuff and who are indie and could use a podcast network. So we're working on that. Uh, Movies We Dig is one of those, but it's also this collective is based In such similar ideas to what this episode is today that I wanted to make sure that I shared it all with you. We will be having more news as things come out. We are building this from scratch with absolutely zero funding because the, anyway, there's no guaranteed money in the podcast right now. And so we are, we're figuring it out. It's going to be slow, but it's going to be really fucking good and really necessary and I ju- really

• 5:17Liv Albert?

  necessary, really, really necessary. So today's episode just means a lot. It's a good introduction to Christie. We're going to be working together hopefully on a lot of other new things, hopefully more podcasts, because there's just, there's so much to say and I really want to be able to bring more of this information, more than I can do just on this show. So there's going to be a lot more of that coming. And until then, please enjoy this gods, ancient history of medicine, Hippocratic medicine, women in medicine and stay tuned because next week

• 5:57Liv Albert?

  we got another big one and it just got more interesting, more infuriating and more, I want to say empowering, but that's because I mean empowering today because rage is a good fuel, particularly when you're fighting fascism.

• 6:30Liv Albert?

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

• 6:53Liv Albert?

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

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Woo.

• 7:02Liv Albert?

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

• 7:17Speaker 02

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

• 7:24Liv Albert?

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

• 8:01Speaker 02

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

• 8:15Liv Albert?

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

• 8:28Speaker 02

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

• 8:38Liv Albert?

  It's there.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:40Liv Albert?

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

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:47Liv Albert?

  So you're at.

• 8:48Speaker 02

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

• 8:56Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  All at once?

• 8:57Liv Albert?

  Huge.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:59Liv Albert?

  It was so fun.

• 9:00Speaker 02

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

• 9:11Liv Albert?

  It's a good excuse.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  There's a holiday.

• 9:12Liv Albert?

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

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:30Liv Albert?

  What's happening?

• 9:31Speaker 02

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

• 9:37Liv Albert?

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

• 9:40Speaker 02

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

• 10:25Speaker 02

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

• 10:45Speaker 02

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

• 10:54Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:55Speaker 02

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

• 11:09Speaker 02

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

• 11:19Liv Albert?

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

• 12:03Liv Albert?

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

• 12:10Speaker 02

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

• 12:27Speaker 02

  I got lost in my own thoughts there.

• 12:29Liv Albert?

  I get it.

• 12:30Speaker 02

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

• 13:11Liv Albert?

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

• 13:15Speaker 02

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

• 13:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 02

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

• 13:54Liv Albert?

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

• 14:13Speaker 02

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

• 14:27Speaker 02

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

• 14:32Speaker 02

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

• 14:44Liv Albert?

  Naturally.

• 14:45Speaker 02

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

• 15:04Liv Albert?

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

• 15:07Speaker 02

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

• 15:20Liv Albert?

  That part hasn't changed.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  It has not changed.

• 15:22Liv Albert?

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

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:27Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like I.

• 15:29Liv Albert?

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

• 15:56Speaker 02

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

• 16:19Liv Albert?

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

• 17:02Speaker 02

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

• 17:47Speaker 02

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

• 18:31Speaker 02

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

• 19:12Liv Albert?

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

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:41Liv Albert?

  And that's like, it's funny to talk about that, like, I'm sure far worse for you as an American, but it's funny to talk about this system as like this system, the overarching system itself. And like, you know, we're not even getting into like the actual individual like system in terms of how it hurts people that even just like the the broader idea of learning about healthcare and the, the, yeah, the, the evolution of it or or lack thereof over the last 2000 years.

• 20:08Speaker 02

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

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And it feels sometimes like where to begin.

• 20:58Speaker 02

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

• 21:15Liv Albert?

  I feel like I said so much.

• 21:19Speaker 02

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

• 21:26Liv Albert?

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

• 21:39Speaker 02

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

• 22:21Speaker 02

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

• 23:04Speaker 02

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

• 23:46Speaker 02

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

• 24:14Liv Albert?

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

• 24:33Speaker 02

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

• 24:37Liv Albert?

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

• 24:42Liv Albert?

  Hippocrates.

• 24:43Speaker 02

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

• 24:54Speaker 02

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

• 25:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 02

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

• 25:17Speaker 02

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

• 25:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Like Socrates is what I'm imagining.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yes, very much so.

• 25:35Speaker 02

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

• 26:07Liv Albert?

  That's ironic today.

• 26:09Speaker 02

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

• 26:28Liv Albert?

  That's funny.

• 26:29Speaker 02

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

• 27:03Liv Albert?

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

• 27:07Speaker 02

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

• 27:10Liv Albert?

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

• 27:18Speaker 02

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

• 27:23Liv Albert?

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

• 27:25Speaker 02

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

• 27:45Speaker 02

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

• 27:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 02

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

• 28:05Liv Albert?

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

• 28:12Speaker 02

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

• 28:33Speaker 02

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

• 29:18Speaker 02

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

• 29:25Liv Albert?

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

• 29:30Speaker 02

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

• 29:53Liv Albert?

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

• 29:58Speaker 02

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

• 30:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 02

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

• 30:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 02

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

• 30:52Liv Albert?

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

• 30:57Liv Albert?

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

• 31:01Speaker 02

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

• 31:08Liv Albert?

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

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:21Liv Albert?

  While he's awake. That's the most you need to know. Wow.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, you know, it kind of highlights this point that like doctors are craftspeople. They're not, you know, for the most part, they're not elites and they have a business to run. So they perform in front of an audience. Which I love that aspect. And then at towards the end of the clip, when the doctor is leaving and he's explaining directions of like, you know, expect this and this and this. And then he turns and goes, oh, maybe sacrifice a white rabbit to this deity. That, that helps sometimes. And I love that because it's a great example of like, you know, the doctors are supposedly being all rational. It's like, but if it makes you feel better.

• 32:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like just in case.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:06Liv Albert?

  Couldn't hurt.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Cover your bases.

• 32:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

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

• 32:24Liv Albert?

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

• 33:08Liv Albert?

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

• 33:29Speaker 02

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

• 34:13Speaker 02

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

• 34:45Liv Albert?

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

• 35:27Liv Albert?

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

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:41Liv Albert?

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

• 35:46Speaker 02

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

• 36:08Liv Albert?

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

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Oh, nope, not wars. We were talking about earlier plague. So the plague of Athens.

• 36:18Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the plague of Athens. And then later, I think about a century later, Rome starts to experience, uh, experiences a plague that lasts about three years. And so they consult the Sibyl and books and they're like, dude, bring Asclepius over. So introducing the cult of Asclepius becomes a state

• 36:39Speaker 02

  action and has official recognition versus there is no law or certification or anything for doctors. You can just claim that title.

• 36:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Liv Albert?

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

• 37:05Speaker 02

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

• 37:16Liv Albert?

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

• 37:21Speaker 02

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

• 37:42Liv Albert?

  Doesn't it?

• 37:43Speaker 02

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

• 37:57Liv Albert?

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

• 38:05Speaker 02

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

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:30Liv Albert?

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

• 39:13Liv Albert?

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

• 39:57Liv Albert?

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

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Well, especially considering the Romans.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Force them to come over half the time too.

• 40:23Liv Albert?

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

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:30Liv Albert?

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

• 41:15Liv Albert?

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

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:26Liv Albert?

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

• 42:06Liv Albert?

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

• 42:26Liv Albert?

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

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Decompress a little.

• 42:36Liv Albert?

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

• 42:46Speaker 02

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

• 42:50Liv Albert?

  Sick.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So, um.

• 42:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah, sorry. I really like went off. I probably won't.

• 42:58Speaker 02

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

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Yes, that Cleopatra.

• 43:46Liv Albert?

  That's right.

• 43:47Speaker 02

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

• 44:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 02

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

• 44:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 02

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

• 44:37Speaker 02

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

• 44:39Liv Albert?

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

• 44:42Speaker 02

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

• 44:46Liv Albert?

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

• 45:29Liv Albert?

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

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Obviously, yeah.

• 45:34Liv Albert?

  And, you know, I, I cannot.

• 45:37Speaker 02

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

• 46:08Liv Albert?

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

• 46:19Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all.

• 46:20Liv Albert?

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

• 46:25Speaker 02

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

• 46:44Liv Albert?

  Hell, yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 02

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

• 46:49Liv Albert?

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

• 46:58Speaker 02

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

• 47:40Liv Albert?

  Those British names sometimes.

• 47:43Speaker 02

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

• 47:51Liv Albert?

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

• 48:00Speaker 02

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

• 48:44Speaker 02

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

• 49:26Liv Albert?

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

• 49:44Speaker 02

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

• 49:48Liv Albert?

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

• 49:52Speaker 02

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

• 50:17Liv Albert?

  You know, they can't be all good.

• 50:20Speaker 02

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

• 51:03Liv Albert?

  Oh my God.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  So interesting case studies like that.

• 51:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 02

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

• 51:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 02

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

• 51:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:37Liv Albert?

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

• 52:10Speaker 02

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

• 52:27Liv Albert?

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

• 52:32Speaker 02

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

• 53:11Speaker 02

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

• 53:35Liv Albert?

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

• 53:50Speaker 02

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

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Like something maybe actually reasonable and helpful.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  And I don't know that like it, the, that answer isn't always clear because a lot of the medical texts are focused on diagnosis. And a lot of ancient texts aren't necessarily concerned with case studies and the results. So we're told how to figure out what a problem is, but and how to treat it, but not how well that treatment works.

• 55:03Liv Albert?

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

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:08Liv Albert?

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

• 55:19Speaker 02

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

• 55:22Liv Albert?

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

• 56:06Liv Albert?

  like, diversity of sexes, like, what are we doing?

• 56:10Speaker 02

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

• 56:51Speaker 02

  You go there, you're out in the countryside, coast, out of a big city. There's a giant theater so that you can listen to music or like decompress and be entertained. There's walking, like, I wonder why people feel better when they go there.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  And those are like legitimate treatments in Hippocratic medicine as well. So that's really important. And I think I mentioned, it's like Hippocratic medicine, again, is like, they don't believe, according to the corpus, they don't believe in divine intervention. That doesn't happen in practice. But the idea is like, there is a rational, natural cause of illness.

• 57:31Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  And as I mentioned before, it's like, treatment usually kind of follows a particular order where you start with a change, like, you know, look at your diet and your regiment, then medication and the last, as a last resort surgery, because, oh, boy, surgery does not.

• 57:47Liv Albert?

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

• 57:51Speaker 02

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

• 58:02Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 58:03Speaker 02

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

• 58:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  They would have done.

• 58:17Liv Albert?

  That they feel is.

• 58:18Speaker 02

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

• 58:20Liv Albert?

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

• 58:33Speaker 02

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

• 58:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  As an active comfort.

• 58:46Liv Albert?

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

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:49Liv Albert?

  I grew up in a very specific household.

• 58:51Speaker 02

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

• 59:14Liv Albert?

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• 59:58Liv Albert?

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• 1:00:41Liv Albert?

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• 1:02:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:50Liv Albert?

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

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Correct, right?

• 1:02:57Liv Albert?

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

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Okay, so basically...

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Aristotle's the one who kind of comes up with the idea that we also see this again in in the Greek play of, oh, shoot, what is it? Uh, the Aminides?

• 1:03:17Liv Albert?

  Hmm, uh huh.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Is that the right one? When Orestes has to go and there's a trial and Athena's involved. And they're, the Furies are basically arguing, it's like, hey, he killed his parent, it's a blood crime, therefore we get to harass him. And Apollo shows up and makes the argument that women are just the vessels. They don't actually contribute any matter to the embryo and therefore because Clytemnestra was just a vessel and that Orestes was wholly, is it Orestes? I think that's right.

• 1:03:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Wholly made up of Agamemnon Goop.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  He is, uh, not guilty of a blood crime against, for killing his mother. And the, it also

• 1:04:04Liv Albert?

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

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, again, a good example of how like these different ideas are, are showing up in our entertainment. Uh, uh, and so another way that is, Aristotle puts it is that like women provide matter, like some kind of base. He actually talks about it as a cheese process. And that like the men's seed activates it and that's what actually gives it form into an infant. Um, there is some disparity, there are like some major differences, like Hippocratic medicine actually leans more towards the idea that men and women in the womb are both pretty similar.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  And their natures can be really similar, but over time, like based on exposure, you might end up being more wet or more dry and that will impact on how manly you are. Um, Hippocratic medicine also, instead of Aristotle, kind of arguing that like women are just a vessel. Hippocratic medicine is of the idea that like men and women contribute something and they are like seeds. And depending on which seed overpowers the other one will give you a masculine woman or a wimpy guy and things like that. So a lot of interesting competitive ideas happening there.

• 1:05:32Liv Albert?

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

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:05:43Liv Albert?

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

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:47Liv Albert?

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

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:29Liv Albert?

  With your tools?

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:38Liv Albert?

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

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:45Liv Albert?

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

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, there's a lot there.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:23Liv Albert?

  But it back then?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Today.

• 1:09:26Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:30Liv Albert?

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

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Medications, Greek.

• 1:09:43Liv Albert?

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

• 1:10:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:36Liv Albert?

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

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:09Liv Albert?

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

• 1:11:51Liv Albert?

  And I just love that what little Greek I know can allow me to be like, oh, what a nerdy little thing I just learned.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, hippopotamus, river horse. I love it.

• 1:12:01Liv Albert?

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

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:12:17Liv Albert?

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

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure if people do want to hear you say that spell, you said it on the episode, you came and talked about Spartacus with us.

• 1:13:00Liv Albert?

  Did I?

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Liv Albert?

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

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:14Liv Albert?

  So sad that I've done that before. Um, no, okay. But speaking of etymology, does that mean that Hippocrates means like strong horse?

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  I think so. Right?

• 1:13:26Liv Albert?

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

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:40Liv Albert?

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

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:53Liv Albert?

  But it does seem very Greek.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  It does. It does for sure. Yeah. Okay. So, so that since the last time I spoke, I learned about another way that Hippocratic medicine was actively differentiating itself from Folk medicine and, and witchcraft. And so, so to get in that, humoral pathology, I've mentioned, it's like, it's these four humors, right? They kind of, for a long time, they only talked about three, because they're like, I don't, but they want four. They want four humors, because that is a better balance than three.

• 1:14:29Liv Albert?

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

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:46Liv Albert?

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

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:15:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, the Zodiac girlies are loving that.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:04Liv Albert?

  There we go.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  -based on race.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Very much suggesting that-

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:25Liv Albert?

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

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:43Liv Albert?

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

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:31Liv Albert?

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

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  They're doing things that make sense.

• 1:17:43Liv Albert?

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

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:10Liv Albert?

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

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:32Liv Albert?

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

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:25Liv Albert?

  I didn't know that. I love that.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:33Liv Albert?

  They're everywhere. I love it.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  But also the cure for those things is menstrual blood and or like something of like that has a similar nature to it. So.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, according to Ripe, but these are well chosen description. Oh, who said it? I have to find it. Yeah, male writers like Pliny said, menstrual blood is a monstrous thing and a great evil. And it's because it was polluting and it could cause harm. But to make sense of the apparently paradoxical nature of menstrual blood as both contagiously corrosive and healing, it's necessary to appreciate three independent ideas. And I need to go back and say, this is Pauline Ripe's article that I've pulled from before I've talked about. She wrote on Roman women, wise women and witches. And she's the one who's like, okay, we have all of these literary descriptions of witches. What could that

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  actually tell us about the practice of folk medicine based on these literary descriptions? So, so this nature of menstrual blood or other things that witches are using to treat things, the explanation of illness or harm comes from excessive flow or stagnation, both of which resulted in decay, withering and wasting. That's not unlike some of the hemoral pathology ideas in terms of like, you can have too much of something, something's out of balance. But folk healing appears to have depended upon the idea of transference of illness and health bringing factors between bodies. So health as an absence of illness, and you remove the impediments to health, then health remains. So like, you kind of

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  like, the idea of like sucking poison out of, or venom out of a bite. That's kind of the same idea. So instead of treatment by opposites, which is hemoral pathology, the rationalist approach, folk medicine is all about using things of a similar nature to draw out what is causing harm. And so the theories themselves are opposite. And I think that it's interesting to look at as just another way that Hippocratic medicine was distinguishing itself from folk medicine.

• 1:22:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Can I bring up, okay, so this is a thing that you've just led me to.

• 1:23:01Liv Albert?

  Start to ruminate on with that explanation of menstrual blood. So that idea that it is like, I'm going to simplify for my point. Like it's basically both poison and curative. Right? So are you familiar with the Euripides play? The, I just covered it and it's like one guy's very three letter name. Um, it, it, so there, there's a Euripides play, which apparently the word will never come to me, even though I just looked up it. But anyway, it's the one where Creusa's son, she was raped by Apollo.

• 1:23:45Liv Albert?

  Um, and her son, uh, is the named character whose name I can't remember because his name is just literally the title of the play. It starts with an I and I've lost it so completely. Thank you. Oh, it's just fucking Ion. Jesus H. Christ, I appreciate it. Anyway, so in the Ion, there is this truly bizarre reference, um, to Gorgon blood. And I, it's funny because I, I had to go through it when I, I wrote this big old piece on Medusa. And this Gorgon blood is so separate from the other mythological details of the Gorgons

• 1:24:25Liv Albert?

  that it really feels like I, in my, in my section of this book, I called it, um, the, uh, the Phlegrian Gorgon, because the story is that this Gorgon, uh, in this play, it's said that this was a Gorgon killed during the Dragon Atomiki in, um, Southern Italy. Instead, like basically separating this Gorgon from the Medusa of the Gorgons. Um, but this Gorgon's blood is said to be both curative and poisonous. And it's like this one reference to a Gorgon's blood being anything like that. It doesn't really exist anywhere else. And now I'm like, oh shit, Euripides is playing with this idea. I assume like, that's so cool and it makes it so much more interesting. And already the Ion is the most fascinatingly feminist play. So just to like,

• 1:25:11Liv Albert?

  At that, I'm, oh my God, it's so good. It's literally about how Apollo is a rapist and how PTSD from assault in women is real. It literally treats this woman's sexual assault by Apollo as the trauma that it would be.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:26Liv Albert?

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

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:08Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Right? Like, again, these ideas have, we still are engaging with them in our medical practices today.

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  There's just more rational science behind it, but those concepts don't go away of like, things that could cause harm can also be healing in some manner. So like, yeah, I'm not surprised that, again, it is really fun to see how playwrights are actually engaging with medical texts as well. Because you don't necessarily think about it that way. But yeah.

• 1:26:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and now I just can't get over it because it's like this Gorgon that already is like this completely not like, doesn't fit into any of the other Gorgon stories.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:49Liv Albert?

  And has this bizarre blood that we've otherwise never heard of. And yeah, to have that link, I'm just now obsessed and wish I could have written it into that book.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:27:09Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  Somehow apotropaic.

• 1:27:11Liv Albert?

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

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, if you think about it, that's how they operate, right? They assume that you are bringing evil to it. And so you fight evil with evil. You fight fire with fire. Uh, it's kind of the idea.

• 1:27:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  So. I thought that was, that was just kind of an interesting thing I had noticed that again, in practice, people were using both.

• 1:27:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Because people will do whatever it takes to regain health, to maintain their health.

• 1:27:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  That just doesn't change.

• 1:27:48Liv Albert?

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

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's, it's such an, like menstrual blood is, again, it's one of these features of a, a human body with a uterus, a functioning uterus, produces menstrual blood, right? And it's actually not harmful to the woman herself.

• 1:28:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  Which is interesting. So that means, uh, but blood in general, like you can't go and, and you can't go to a sanctuary, some place dedicated to gods or immortality, because if you introduce that, it pollutes it, right? So menstrual blood is polluting. But women are immune to that pollution, or they're inured against it. And that's also, you know, we tie a lot to who was responsible for handling the dead and preparing the dead um, in ancient Greece. It's women, because they're already polluted to some extent that they can handle

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  the miasma of a dead body. Uh, they can handle mortality in a way that the gods or men are not predisposed to.

• 1:29:20Liv Albert?

  It's so fascinating because it's simultaneously like so empowering and so reductive and gross and like.

• 1:29:29Liv Albert?

  It's like this, it's this recognition that you, you know, I'm, we're saying women, we do mean people with a uterus, especially to now more than ever, we do mean that, but like it, it, when it it's, it's important to say women in the ancient world because it was coming with this very heavy burden of like existence. So, but like they, they were able to recognize that women, that uterus has held this like enormous power that they would never be able to harness. And all they could do is like use, you know, like really just dehumanize to the point of being able to utilize this uterus

• 1:30:11Liv Albert?

  outside of its human body. But at the same time, like I, it's just, it's so, I don't know, it's so wild. It's so wild to me. It reminds me of, and I think this is another timely thing to say in this episode, but of this, I saw a TikTok the other day where a person, I'm, I'm going to assume they were a trans person based on this context, but that they were replying to a TikTok video of a woman, a, a woman who had like asked with, with very, you know, compassionate sincerity, asked for someone to explain why conservatives are so fucking afraid of trans people. And this person's response will live with me forever. And I feel like it's, it's kind of what I've, it's

• 1:30:54Liv Albert?

  kind of what I've just never been able to fully put into words, but like what, why I pushed the way I do in this show, but it's that, that, you know, the conservatives and by, by that, we do mean the patriarchal structure is so afraid of trans people because they can't control them in the way that they patriarchy has learned to control women, because they have used everything you're saying is this, this, like these 2,500 years of Finding the this method of control, right? The dehumanization, the fact that people with a uterus are just incorrect men, that they can just be used and controlled.

• 1:31:36Liv Albert?

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

• 1:32:17Liv Albert?

  But it is also so in line with the struggle of women for the last 2,500 years because we are all struggling against the patriarchy. Like, literally, it's not about, you know, who's got a uterus or who doesn't. It's about this struggle against the patriarchy.

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:32:34Liv Albert?

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

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, which I'm finally to the the whole focus of our talk. And we're only what, an hour and a half?

• 1:32:46Liv Albert?

  I know. Was like, where do women fit into all of this Hippocratic medicine nonsense? And, you know, I've, I've, I've talked about the, we've mentioned it a few times. It's like, all right, women are inferior bodies to men because of the uterus. And you know what the solution to all of their problems is? Have sex and get pregnant. Well, naturally, because then they're of use.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:13Liv Albert?

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

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Well, that's how you stop the bleeding.

• 1:33:22Liv Albert?

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

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:39Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah. I forget what it was, but yeah, yeah. The period movie.

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  Some things have not changed.

• 1:33:44Liv Albert?

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

• 1:34:28Liv Albert?

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

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:36:05Liv Albert?

  It's the dehumanization.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  She can do this despite her sex.

• 1:36:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Liv Albert?

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

• 1:36:47Liv 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.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:36:58Liv 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.

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  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

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:37:41Liv 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.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:38:12Liv Albert?

  Yes. That happens with so many of my guests and I love that. Like, yeah, 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 will 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. 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.

• 1:38:54Liv 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

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:09Liv Albert?

  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. 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

• 1:39:47Liv Albert?

  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 Western rant, but like, but the, but the Hippocratic of it all just reminds me like,

• 1:40:27Liv Albert?

  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 they, 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 a medical structure outside of the Hippocratic

• 1:41:12Liv Albert?

  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.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  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

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:41:45Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:40Liv Albert?

  No, exactly. We have to highlight that these are issues because like, there isn't a solution. Like when you were 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.

• 1:43:24Liv 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,

• 1:44:07Liv Albert?

  and just generally like, just 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.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:45:05Liv Albert?

  Something blue?

• 1:45:06Speaker 02

  Is it white? It might be white.

• 1:45:08Liv Albert?

  Like, like phlegm or pus or something?

• 1:45:10Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So white.

• 1:45:13Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:45:31Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  Yellow is Asian, white.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:45:43Liv Albert?

  There we go, yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  Than this, this one can, yeah.

• 1:45:47Liv 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, ha, ha, ha. But like, it, you know, we're, we're seeing right now all of the DEI stuff coming away,

• 1:46:29Liv Albert?

  like, 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.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 1:46:38Liv Albert?

  Obviously.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  Look who just got cabinet positions in our government.

• 1:46:42Liv 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.

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  Nepotism, yeah.

• 1:47:24Liv 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 say why people are threatened and I mean it like as if like, cause 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.

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:03Liv Albert?

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

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. 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 on,

• 1:48:16Liv Albert?

  Perfect, because it's been 11 minutes of me just screaming about the patriarchy?

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  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-Saia, Heidi Marx, 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.

• 1:49:01Liv Albert?

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

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:49:05Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, no, no, yeah, I get it. Yeah. Like, yeah, you're in terms of what you research so deeply. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:49:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, go make some new friends.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

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

• 1:49:28Liv 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, she was, 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.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  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 some women-

• 1:50:12Liv 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.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:50:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

  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, no one wants that.

• 1:51:05Liv 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 the dead are-

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  Because 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 military. 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, you get a little gander before you sew him back up.

• 1:51:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and I imagine they weren't doing that to women in most cases because I mean, if it is primarily on like sort of a military, a military kind of purpose, they're not, yeah, 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.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:52:29Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  And so like, you know, what they could observe is in part like.

• 1:52:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, confirming something.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Confirming, yeah.

• 1:52:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so, so, yeah, the question is like, you know, if, if folk medicine was a major competition for Hippocratic medicine, 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 dehumanizing you to a certain extent?

• 1:53:08Liv Albert?

  I mean, isn't that the question?

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  It really is, right?

• 1:53:13Liv Albert?

  It is a big, enormous question.

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:53:19Liv Albert?

  Screams at all of the white women. I mean, us being some of them, but Jesus.

• 1:53:25Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  When you lay out the logic of it, you're like, how does that make any sense that that would be a cure in Hippocratic medicine? And I'm going back to Plagueorn's book, Unwell Women, and she just, she just lays it out really well. On the Greek island of Kost, many centuries, this is just an anecdote that she made up herself. 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 hallucination 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.

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:54:50Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:55:13Liv Albert?

  Plenty of female blood.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Plenty of. 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.

• 1:55:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:55Speaker 02

  And that that's not the cause.

• 1:55:57Liv 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.

• 1:56:11Liv Albert?

  Essentially what they're saying, you know what it? It makes me want to rethink um 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.

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:44Liv Albert?

  But.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  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

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:57:12Liv 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 thirteen 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, uh, 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.

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:57Liv Albert?

  Surprise.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  And so a number of treatments would be prescribed for these ailments. You would have purgatives that were either ingested or delivered through suppositories. And that would provoke the expulsion of an overabundant humor. Um, so if you were very unlucky, they were trying to repel the womb. Uh, so they would have women inhale foul smells or ingest a repulsive drink. Um, sometimes it was nicer. Sometimes they would lure the womb with good smells. Um, but this involved the process of fumigation, uh, where you would smoke out a woman's vagina.

• 1:58:47Liv Albert?

  No.

• 1:58:47Speaker 02

  With sweet smelling, uh, fragrances or inserting pleasant smelling pessaries. Like, okay, not a fun solution there. Other treatments, because again, a lot of it's associated with too much blood, uh, 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. Uh, 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.

• 1:59:30Liv Albert?

  Uh, like I, I, I just, sorry. I'm so horrified.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so, so this is what kind of we've been talking about and Upson Seiya, 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 anatomic distinctions. And then this later goes into race as well, as we talked about.

• 2:00:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  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 re- uh, the reproductive interests of the state, which was continually dealing with population shortages. And so that's why you see things now like, um, 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 gonna force you to have more children and not provide those safety nets.

• 2:00:50Liv 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 have 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, like, I, I mean, my entire career, I think, is based around like, looking at

• 2:01:34Liv Albert?

  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 um, the country that, uh, I'm not going to say its name, but you know, the one that's, uh, currently committing genocide, according to all of the necessary international courts.

• 2:02:18Liv Albert?

  That country, um, I saw someone talking about how, uh, in, I think it was like the eighties, maybe, you know, that country's only been around since nineteen forty-eight. So we can't go that far back.

• 2:02:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:02:28Liv Albert?

  Um, but there, there was a period where, uh, they were, um, getting a lot of, uh, immigrants from, um, 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, um, 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, Obviously, obviously, there are people are everywhere and that's why this country is

• 2:03:13Liv Albert?

  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,

• 2:03:47Liv Albert?

  that's a problem a lot, like it's like, and, and yeah, I mean, it all just leads into eugenics. We are all, you know, this, the phrases I, I've been using it a lot and it, it's 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?

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

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

• 2:04:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:05:00Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Without their knowledge.

• 2:05:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:05:02Speaker 02

  Like, that that is the real danger. It's like the loss of bodily autonomy in this one regard means that the government can't control your bodily autonomy in whatever way they say fit.

• 2:05:12Liv 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 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 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 also don't, clearly.

• 2:05:56Liv Albert?

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

• 2:06:08Speaker 02

  Medical terms are commonly used to.

• 2:06:11Liv Albert?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:06:32Liv Albert?

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

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

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

• 2:06:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah, but I mean, that's what, 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, you know, I just, apropos of nothing, absolutely out of nowhere. 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 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.

• 2:07:24Speaker 02

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

• 2:07:30Liv Albert?

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

• 2:07:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:07:50Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  So, 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?

• 2:08:05Liv Albert?

  You're waiting.

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:08:07Liv Albert?

  You're waiting.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  Waiting? Is, is it just waiting?

• 2:08:12Liv Albert?

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

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

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

• 2:08:19Liv Albert?

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

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  Suffering.

• 2:08:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, suffering. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:27Speaker 02

  So, um, this blew my mind to like, realize, uh, coming again from, uh, Upsinseya, and Atall's work is, um, hang on, must find it to make sure I'm saying it. Uh, the, uh, 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,

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

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

• 2:09:06Liv Albert?

  No, I bet.

• 2:09:08Speaker 02

  So your cure could be a death sentence.

• 2:09:11Liv 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 the way that we in the West 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

• 2:09:56Liv Albert?

  you 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?

• 2:10:31Speaker 02

  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-

• 2:10:50Liv 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?

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, Dr. I'm pretty sure it's Sims is his name, who's considered the father of gynecology. His development-

• 2:11:04Liv Albert?

  Great, but we love him.

• 2:11:05Speaker 02

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

• 2:11:12Liv Albert?

  Fuck off. Holy shit.

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:11:31Liv Albert?

  Of course.

• 2:11:33Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

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• 2:13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:09Liv Albert?

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

• 2:13:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:13:22Liv Albert?

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

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

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

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  And.

• 2:13:42Liv 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.

• 2:13:57Liv 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,

• 2:14:39Liv Albert?

  because I'm just always talking about 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 tend to try to make it educational 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.

• 2:15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. No, I, so, so hopefully I'm going to put a fun spin on it because earlier I asked like these women, right? How are the, why are these women claiming this term, claiming this particular medical knowledge?

• 2:15:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:38Speaker 02

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

• 2:15:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  Right?

• 2:15:44Liv Albert?

  Fuck yeah.

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  So, um.

• 2:15:46Liv Albert?

  We're fucking smart.

• 2:15:48Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:15:58Speaker 02

  How does that work?

• 2:15:59Liv Albert?

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

• 2:16:02Speaker 02

  But you have to like-

• 2:16:03Liv Albert?

  But technically, I, yeah, technically.

• 2:16:05Speaker 02

  Technically, that's what it means, right?

• 2:16:07Liv Albert?

  But in practice?

• 2:16:08Speaker 02

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

• 2:16:15Liv Albert?

  Can you remind us what that?

• 2:16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Agnotike is the story of 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. 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. And Agnotike saw this.

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  She dressed up as 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, went to treat the first 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 Agnotike being like, she must be doing something, because all of the women are asking for her, or 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 a woman.

• 2:17:43Speaker 02

  And she has to reveal herself again in front of the court of men.

• 2:17:46Liv Albert?

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

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the

• 2:17:55Liv Albert?

  There's so many stories of women having this

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:18:16Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  The Athenians amended the law so that freeborn women, not slaves, apparently, could learn the art of medicine.

• 2:18:23Liv Albert?

  So be

• 2:18:24Speaker 02

  And I'm like, collective action on top of it has a like.

• 2:18:28Liv 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 would have only a couple hundred years if we're talking Alexandria being trained. But like,

• 2:18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:44Liv Albert?

  You know, like I, I wish that was a story from Athens and not Hygin's Fabulae.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  I know. But it, it, 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.

• 2:19:09Liv 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.

• 2:19:52Liv 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.

• 2:20:09Speaker 02

  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 agnautiki 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.

• 2:20:40Liv 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? For like any reason.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:21:04Liv Albert?

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

• 2:21:10Speaker 02

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

• 2:21:12Liv Albert?

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

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 2:21:59Speaker 02

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

• 2:22:30Liv Albert?

  Ew!

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

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

• 2:22:36Liv Albert?

  Was she allowed in the end? Sorry.

• 2:22:38Speaker 02

  Oh, she got a cesarean.

• 2:22:39Liv Albert?

  Fuck yeah.

• 2:22:40Speaker 02

  My mom, my mom don't mess around.

• 2:22:41Liv Albert?

  Good.

• 2:22:43Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:23:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:23:19Liv Albert?

  Fuck off.

• 2:23:21Speaker 02

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

• 2:23:25Liv 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.

• 2:23:35Speaker 02

  My mom was 29. I got the same, 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.

• 2:23:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  Of what doctors are saying to women.

• 2:23:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah. In the 20th century.

• 2:23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:00Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, I mean, I, 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 like even deal with any of the trouble, but like I, it, it, the, the, the horror stories I've heard of, of women who have tried to like, yeah, uh, uh, it's just horrifying.

• 2:24:20Speaker 02

  Well, and I, so that I forgot to bring it up, that anecdote, that claygorn 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 cla- it was great. I loved my like, um, history of medicine class because we had what I called, um, difficult. Conversations based on Idolon 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.

• 2:25:02Liv 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.

• 2:25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, 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.

• 2:25:27Liv Albert?

  And which applies to the whole population.

• 2:25:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:25:30Liv Albert?

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

• 2:25:34Speaker 02

  Well, I asked all of them, including the women, 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?

• 2:25:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  Perfectly fine.

• 2:25:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's not a big fucking deal.

• 2:25:52Speaker 02

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

• 2:25:59Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

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

• 2:26:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:09Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:26:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:26:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:27:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  I don't know how I got on that tangent.

• 2:27:08Liv Albert?

  No, 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 going to 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.

• 2:27:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:27:47Liv 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 premenopausal 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.

• 2:28:33Liv 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?

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:28:54Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 2:28:55Speaker 02

  I I am anticipating based on all of my research.

• 2:28:58Liv Albert?

  I love it. So I I was simultaneously like, so I've been writing a novel. And I've been, I am 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.

• 2:29:24Liv Albert?

  But I was Googling the ancient Greek words for lavender and rosemary, just like completely separately.

• 2:29:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah. 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 chase 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.

• 2:30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:08Liv Albert?

  One, because that's literally the only way 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.

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:37Liv Albert?

  Anyway, yeah.

• 2:30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And yeah, like it's, and I, one of the main reasons I posit, like my imagining of a Medica going into the field. I made a little novella about her was that if she is of 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 want to say ownership, but like she doesn't have control over her daughter.

• 2:31:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:11Speaker 02

  Right? Something can happen to her daughter. 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. And having then to have the power, because you can't, you can't also without bodily autonomy, can't say no to sex. You can't say no to someone forcing you to have it.

• 2:31:33Liv Albert?

  Especially when they are prescribing sex for your issues.

• 2:31:38Speaker 02

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

• 2:31:53Liv Albert?

  Oh my God, good title.

• 2:31:55Speaker 02

  It's, it's a great book. I, I highly recommend it as well. I'll be reading 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 and 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.

• 2:32:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:31Speaker 02

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

• 2:32:43Liv 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

• 2:32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57Liv Albert?

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

• 2:33:03Speaker 02

  Um, yeah.

• 2:33:04Liv Albert?

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

• 2:33:08Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. And, and so, yeah, I was going back to Agnautiki 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? Um, 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.

• 2:33:40Liv Albert?

  Ah.

• 2:33:41Speaker 02

  Um, Agnautiki reasserts woman'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.

• 2:33:51Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:33:51Speaker 02

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

• 2:34:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:01Speaker 02

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

• 2:34:06Liv Albert?

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

• 2:34:16Speaker 02

  And modesty tells you, you shouldn't be allowing a man, a man not of your husband or household digitally massaging your vagina, right? Like

• 2:34:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:27Speaker 02

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

• 2:34:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  For that. So like, women were left in such a terrible position with the introduction of Hippocratic medicine and just male practitioners. Like, maybe, maybe they are developing things that are hel- 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.

• 2:34:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:54Speaker 02

  Um, so yeah, and 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 Ma- Maya and a mediciners, 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, um, like Phaenestrate 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.

• 2:35:37Speaker 02

  Like, that's kind of the question, right? Like, ultimately, you have to submit

• 2:35:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:41Speaker 02

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

• 2:35:48Liv 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. Like,

• 2:36:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:36:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:21Speaker 02

  Because why not?

• 2:36:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:22Speaker 02

  Is she someone you trust?

• 2:36:24Liv 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.

• 2:36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Liv 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.

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:37:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:13Speaker 02

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

• 2:37:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:37:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:38:02Liv 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 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 place like Athens, which was,

• 2:38:47Liv Albert?

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

• 2:39:26Liv Albert?

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

• 2:39:31Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:39:40Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  It's literally, like, even in Sicilian standards, it's remote.

• 2:39:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:46Speaker 02

  Like, it's not on the coast, it's up in the mountains. Who are you gonna turn to?

• 2:39:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, uh, Upsinseia and 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, um, 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

• 2:40:36Speaker 02

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

• 2:40:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:40:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:58Speaker 02

  Instead of like actually just understanding.

• 2:41:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:41:17Liv 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, but well, mom, you thought about losing weight? Like it's, yeah, it's fucking horrifying.

• 2:41:41Speaker 02

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

• 2:41:48Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 2:41:48Speaker 02

  Period.

• 2:41:49Liv Albert?

  And now they can use that.

• 2:41:51Speaker 02

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

• 2:41:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:42:13Liv Albert?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 2:42:14Speaker 02

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

• 2:42:17Liv 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 it like, it's likely not necessary information and it's one of those things that just gets asked.

• 2:42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:31Speaker 02

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

• 2:42:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:37Speaker 02

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

• 2:42:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:41Speaker 02

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

• 2:42:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:49Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:42:50Liv Albert?

  So many reasons.

• 2:42:51Speaker 02

  It's, yeah.

• 2:42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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

• 2:43:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:43:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:44:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:01Speaker 02

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

• 2:44:08Liv Albert?

  Can I make another?

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, go for it.

• 2:44:10Liv 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,

• 2:44:52Liv 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

• 2:45:35Liv 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 comes so foreign to us, because capitalism requires that to be foreign to us in order to continue to maintain control.

• 2:46:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:46:40Liv Albert?

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

• 2:46:44Speaker 02

  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 texts complain about patients just not listening to physicians. So again, the whole rise of Hippocratic medicine is in

• 2:47:26Speaker 02

  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. Have patients listen to them.

• 2:47:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:39Speaker 02

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

• 2:47:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that one was so interesting.

• 2:47:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:48:29Liv Albert?

  Antigone.

• 2:48:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:49:00Liv Albert?

  Respect.

• 2:49:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:49:17Liv 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.

• 2:49:55Speaker 02

  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

• 2:50:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:14Speaker 02

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

• 2:50:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

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

• 2:50:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:27Speaker 02

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

• 2:50:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:31Speaker 02

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

• 2:50:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  So

• 2:50:36Liv 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?

• 2:50:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:50:50Liv Albert?

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

• 2:50:56Speaker 02

  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, but 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. 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

• 2:51:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:52:08Speaker 02

  So this is what Graves supposedly said. 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.

• 2:52:31Speaker 02

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

• 2:52:38Liv 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.

• 2:52:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:44Liv Albert?

  Men love to take credit after the fact.

• 2:52:47Speaker 02

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

• 2:52:57Liv Albert?

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

• 2:53:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, but what I love is, like, Mrs. Leek said, like, "You dumb asses 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."

• 2:53:30Liv Albert?

  Oh, she freed at this point, at least?

• 2:53:31Speaker 02

  She is freed.

• 2:53:32Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 2:53:32Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:53:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:42Speaker 02

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

• 2:53:47Liv Albert?

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

• 2:53:48Speaker 02

  Leave.

• 2:53:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:50Speaker 02

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

• 2:53:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:54Speaker 02

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

• 2:54:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:54:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:54:31Liv Albert?

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

• 2:54:37Speaker 02

  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, you know, what do women have to do in order to be viewed as authorities? So one is practicing like a man, like actually knowing Hippocratic medicine seems to be an aspect.

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  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, it's like, whatever that means.

• 2:55:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:31Speaker 02

  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, Greyquorum, which is just basically.

• 2:56:07Liv Albert?

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

• 2:56:12Speaker 02

  The Greek 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.

• 2:56:41Speaker 02

  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

• 2:57:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:57:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:57:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:58:08Liv Albert?

  Duh.

• 2:58:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

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

• 2:58:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:58:39Liv 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. Like they can't, they still have to be like, but keep it manly. Cause rationale is manly.

• 2:58:57Speaker 02

  Keep the male energy up.

• 2:58:59Liv 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.

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And so, so, um, so practices of medicine like a man has these maternal qualities. And the last big one is chaste. 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.

• 2:59:36Liv Albert?

  How am I not surprised?

• 2:59:37Speaker 02

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

• 2:59:46Liv Albert?

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

• 2:59:51Speaker 02

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

• 2:59:55Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:59:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:00:12Speaker 02

  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 when 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.

• 3:00:52Speaker 02

  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, um... At least that's true in Western Rome.

• 3:01:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:07Speaker 02

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

• 3:01:14Liv Albert?

  Ugh.

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:01:47Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:01:48Speaker 02

  I know.

• 3:01:49Liv Albert?

  Sorry, there's so much happening in there.

• 3:01:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:02:01Liv Albert?

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

• 3:02:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:02:10Liv Albert?

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

• 3:02:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:02:26Liv Albert?

  Great. The bar is low?

• 3:02:29Speaker 02

  Bar is low. Um.

• 3:02:31Liv Albert?

  Good. Yay.

• 3:02:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:02:41Liv Albert?

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

• 3:02:47Speaker 02

  That's true. Everything in moderation.

• 3:02:49Liv Albert?

  No, the men.

• 3:02:49Speaker 02

  Everything in moderation. At least that applies to men, too. Men who have too much sex with women, like, what are you on, man? You like your wife a little too much there, sir.

• 3:02:58Liv Albert?

  Imagine if we stigmatized men for having too much sex.

• 3:03:04Speaker 02

  We try and it doesn't work.

• 3:03:07Liv Albert?

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

• 3:03:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:11Liv Albert?

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

• 3:03:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:03:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:30Speaker 02

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

• 3:03:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:35Speaker 02

  There's not really any other social safety nets for them.

• 3:03:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:03:51Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 3:03:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:04:14Speaker 02

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

• 3:04:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:04:43Liv Albert?

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

• 3:04:46Speaker 02

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

• 3:05:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:05:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

• 3:05:31Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 3:05:31Liv Albert?

  Um, I just for like a slightly lighter, because I, in hearing all of this talk about, you know, the, just the freed status. Cause 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.

• 3:05:59Speaker 02

  I live in the state of denial, so.

• 3:06:01Liv 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 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.

• 3:06:46Liv 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 prostitution in Pompeii.

• 3:07:08Speaker 02

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

• 3:07:10Liv 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.

• 3:07:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Well.

• 3:07:54Liv Albert?

  Sorry.

• 3:07:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:08:10Speaker 02

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

• 3:08:54Liv Albert?

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

• 3:08:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:09:53Speaker 02

  Did I have that down? Basically, he was just asking, it was 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,

• 3:10:11Speaker 02

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

• 3:10:15Liv Albert?

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

• 3:10:18Speaker 02

  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. 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,

• 3:11:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:11:11Liv Albert?

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

• 3:11:25Liv 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.

• 3:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:11:39Liv Albert?

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

• 3:11:45Speaker 02

  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?

• 3:12:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:12:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:12:47Liv Albert?

  And it took only twenty eight hundred years.

• 3:12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:53Liv Albert?

  And it's still not happening.

• 3:12:55Speaker 02

  And it's, it's, it is, it was started, 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.

• 3:13:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, I also know, yeah, like, they've also paused notifying, or like, the, I don't, I assume it would be CDC, but I feel like it.

• 3:13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, CDC communications.

• 3:13:24Liv Albert?

  Right, CDC communications.

• 3:13:25Speaker 02

  With bird flu going around.

• 3:13:27Liv Albert?

  Well, and tuberculosis is overtaking Kansas.

• 3:13:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:13:30Liv Albert?

  Tuberculosis.

• 3:13:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:13:33Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 3:13:35Speaker 02

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

• 3:13:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:47Speaker 02

  healthcare practice is paused.

• 3:13:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:51Speaker 02

  For who knows how long.

• 3:13:52Liv Albert?

  Keep filling your cabinet with white Christian nationalists.

• 3:13:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:14:27Speaker 02

  Um, so in anticipation of this, my alma mater, the University of Iowa, uh, plans to close its 50-year-old Department of Gender, Women's, 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's 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.

• 3:14:56Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 3:14:56Speaker 02

  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, Phoenix, whatever. I don't mean whatever in that regard.

• 3:15:21Liv Albert?

  I get it.

• 3:15:22Speaker 02

  And Native American indigenous studies. All the marginalized knowledge.

• 3:15:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:26Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 3:16:00Liv Albert?

  Well, here's the thing, um.

• 3:16:03Liv Albert?

  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

• 3:16:14Liv Albert?

  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. And when you do that, you inherently learn to, to recognize when

• 3:16:53Liv Albert?

  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.

• 3:17:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:17:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:33Speaker 02

  Of course it is.

• 3:17:34Liv 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. Um, 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,

• 3:18:19Liv 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.

• 3:18:41Speaker 02

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

• 3:18:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:47Speaker 02

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

• 3:19:01Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 3:19:02Speaker 02

  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 ten pages worth.

• 3:19:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:21Speaker 02

  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...

• 3:20:06Speaker 02

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

• 3:20:10Liv 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.

• 3:20:35Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 3:20:35Liv Albert?

  Even when you're telling me terrible fucking things.

• 3:20:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:20:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:21:06Liv 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.

• 3:21:16Speaker 02

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

• 3:21:26Liv 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.

• 3:21:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:21:57Liv Albert?

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

• 3:22:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:22:14Liv 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.

• 3:22:38Speaker 02

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

• 3:22:40Liv Albert?

  Oh, absolutely. You guys are the best.

• 3:22:41Speaker 02

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

• 3:22:45Liv 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.

• 3:22:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:23:04Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 3:23:04Speaker 02

  Apparently we ain't got time to read.

• 3:23:06Liv 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.

• 3:23:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:23:45Liv 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,

• 3:24:25Speaker 02

  This one's gonna hit close to home.

• 3:24:27Liv Albert?

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

• 3:24:35Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 3:24:36Liv Albert?

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

• 3:24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And and people who are listening, you know, you want to hear more about ancient medicine? Let live know, let me know, because there's some ideas. I had a nineteen page timeline and it wasn't enough.

• 3:24:57Liv Albert?

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

• 3:25:04Liv Albert?

  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?

• 3:25:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:25:54Liv Albert?

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

• 3:26:01Speaker 02

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

• 3:26:03Liv Albert?

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

• 3:26:09Liv 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.

• 3:26:16Speaker 02

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

• 3:26:34Liv 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

• 3:27:13Liv 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

• 3:27:57Liv 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

• 3:28:40Liv Albert?

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

• 3:28:46Liv 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.

• 3:29:08Liv 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.

• 3:30:06Speaker 04

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• 3:30:24Speaker 05

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• 3:30:37Speaker 04

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