ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: Women Are Human Too (Women's 'Health & Medicine')

This (EPIC) episode is a melding of episodes covering the history of women's health and medicine, featuring coversations with Dr Helen King and Dr Christie Vogler. First, Liv speaks with Professor Helen King about her new book Immaculate Forms https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/helen-king/immaculate-forms/9781541606531/?lens=basic-books, and the history of the female body. From the ancient world (women were wet and spongy) to the more modern (Man Discovers Clitoris). Plus, Artemis and periods https://theconversation.com/artemis-is-a-new-body-suit-for-period-pain-heres-why-its-named-after-a-greek-goddess-198915. The original title of this episode which aired in 2024 is Conversations: Women Are Wet & Spongy, the History of the Female Body w/ Prof Helen King. Then, Liv is joined by long time friend of the show, Dr Christie Vogler who talks about women of the Roman world who practiced medicine, in varied forms, and how these women were seen and understood in the wider Roman world. Follow Christie on Twitter https://twitter.com/cmvogue?s=21 and check out her podcast, Movies We Dig https://www.movieswedig.com/, part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. The original title of this episode which aired in 2022 is Conversations: The Intersection of Magic & Medicine, Women as Medica in the Ancient World w/ Dr. Christie Vogler. 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/grouptrip.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show we recommend.

• 0:47Liv Albert?

  In 1926, you had the Rockefellers. In 2026, there's a new kind of billionaire overlord.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  The important thing about Elon Musk is how he exploited flaws in our psychology and flaws in our political and economic system.

• 1:03Liv Albert?

  This is Lizzie O'Leary, host of Slate's What Next TBD. We're a tech podcast that isn't just a tech podcast. We're a show about power.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  We start from almost nothing and we wind up with, you know, a whole civilization.

• 1:16Liv Albert?

  A show about money.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  They don't necessarily need the prediction markets to believe that for a long period of time. They just needed to change for minutes.

• 1:26Liv Albert?

  And a show about the real people fighting back.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Some people are going and destroying these cameras. They're cutting down the poles, they're driving trucks into them. This is straight up a meme at this point, and I did not expect that.

• 1:40Liv Albert?

  Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.

• 2:19Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Mitt's Baby and I am your host Liv. And I am here with, well, today begins a little series of anniversary episodes where I am putting together some of my favorite episodes and the ones that I would like you all to hear again, uh, for the first time, various, you know, various episodes that I think are important. And do they often or almost entirely revolve around my thoughts over Christopher Nolan's Odyssey? Maybe a little.

• 3:00Liv Albert?

  Am I really struggling with how to interact with it because of how many people keep defending his choices? Particularly about the women to me? Yeah. Yeah, I am. And I just, I'm gonna say one quick thing. If your defense for why he made Helen of the Odyssey into a terrified, broken battered woman is that it is just a reasonable result of her inclusion in the war, then you're part of the problem. Cause like, yeah, no one's denying that. The issue is that that's not how she's treated in Homer. And so to

• 3:44Liv Albert?

  force that upon her character is incredibly dangerous to modern women. Women are killed by men like every day, like every day, usually by men they know, usually by their partners more often than not. They're killed by their partners. And so I do not want to see a fictional woman be given that status when it is not in the source material because it is.

• 4:17Liv Albert?

  At best, just misogynist and at worst, straight up dangerous in the world we live now to, to take away all of the female character's agency and control and make her afraid of her husband. And I have a lot I can say about the other ones too, because I got a DM from someone just defending all those choices to me and guess what, I will address it. But this past weekend was my birthday and I also went on two different CBC, radio and TV shows, which was incredibly cool and deeply overwhelming. So I haven't had the chance to make a new episode and instead you are getting the, we are going to into our 10th

• 4:58Liv Albert?

  year of this podcast. I cannot believe that we've been doing it this long and it just turns out there is truly so much content that I have already put out into the world, but which is more relevant now than it was in the years since and thus here I am again. And so today begins a little series. I'm just gonna be re-releasing a bunch of my favorite bits this week, but this first one is surprise, surprise about women. We are looking at just some of the history of women's health and medicine. Um, so I'm featuring two conversations today. The first is with Dr. Helen King, whose book came out a couple of years ago

• 5:40Liv Albert?

  called Immaculate Forms. And it is about the history well beyond the ancient world of women's health, female bodied medicine, various things like that. And then that conversation is followed in this episode by one with longtime friend of the show, Dr. Kristy Vogler, who is also the host of the Movies We Dig podcast, but in her professional slash academic life specializes in another history of women's medicine, but specifically women practicing medicine and how that often intersected with what the men would call magic. I wonder why. And so that episode will also play today. If you're interested in hearing more from

• 6:26Liv Albert?

  Last March, uh, March 2025, we did a big two-part episode on a broader history of women, like medicine relating to the female body, particularly in the ancient world. That is where we learned that, well, actually, it might have been mentioned in Helen King, too. You'll see. Either way, where we learned that Aristotle believed that menstrual blood was corrosive.

• 6:51Liv Albert?

  No one could have tested that. It's not that hard. Um, and so we learned just this long history of how female bodies have been determined to be just secondary, just, just not the default, just messed up men's bodies. And, um, frankly, it's been thousands of years and I'm just over it. So we're going to learn about it again. And, uh, happy birthday to me. Women are people, too. It's not all men, but it's always a man.

• 7:34Liv Albert?

  Conversations. Ancient Greek Gynecology 101. Women are wet and spongy. The history of the female body with Professor Helen King.

• 7:58Liv Albert?

  Well, I'm, I'm so excited to speak with you today about your new book, Immaculate Forms, which like, it's a lovely title, but then of course we find out the topic and I was like, oh, I cannot wait to have you on the show. Um, so I mean, I just want to hear literally everything. Um, so the book is about, you know, women's bodies in the ancient world, right? And so, yeah, how did you start?

• 8:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, ancient up to modern. I see. So I started with the, the publisher got in touch with me. I think it was twenty seventeen or twenty sixteen, ages ago. I know, I know, and said, we'd really like you to write a book on women's bodies, the history of. And I'm like, hmm, that's a really small topic, not.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  Okay, and I was currently, at that point, I was running the Department of Classical Studies at the Open University. And I was dealing with my mum getting increasingly frail. And it was like, I really cannot think about writing a book, let alone one on a huge topic like that. So, you know, come back to me. And of course they did. So I came back to them and decided the way to do this was to go for a four body part structure. So go womb, clitoris, sorry, start the outside, start with the chapters in the right order, breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb. Now womb I knew most about, so I thought, that's quite fun, we'll have that as the final chapter. And I'll start with breasts because I haven't really done history of breasts, but great topic.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  And for all of them, I start with the ancient world and I move towards now. So for example, in the hymen section, I have a whole lot of stuff on virginity restoration now, which is, I know, which is just freaky. Yeah. I think is the word. And I decided to do it through two lenses, through medicine and through religion. Which of course is where the myth comes in. So I'm defining religion in a pretty broad way. Anything that sort of goes beyond the now, the material, the physical. So I do a lot on Christianity, on Eve and on Mary. So I got completely obsessed in the hymen chapter with the question of, does Mary have a hymen?

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Which, you know, had never been an issue in my life before. I'm not Roman Catholic. I'm Church of England, we don't have a particular devotion to Mary. If we do, we think of her as a sort of revolutionary figure, you know, pulling down the mighty from their seats and exalting the humble and meek. You know, she's kind of a revolutionary woman. So to think of her in terms of body and does she have a hymen? And if so, does it get broken when Jesus is born? And if not, why not? And womb, it just took me off into a whole new world of weirdness, actually. Worlds of weirdness, I think is where I've got to.

• 10:43Liv Albert?

  Um, yeah, so the world of weirdness is where I cut you off and I am obsessed. I mean, I want to hear everything. I, I don't even know where to like, when to ask my question. So maybe keep, keep going, but oh my God, I'm obsessed with the hymen thing.

• 10:57Speaker 06

  Okay. Yeah. The hymen thing is pretty weird. So, so breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb. At one point I thought of calling the book breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb. And the problem with that, people were saying, well, if you go into a bookshop and you say, excuse me, have you got breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb? You're going to get a really strange reaction from the bookseller. So maybe not, but in my mind, that's sort of what it's called. So breasts, we start with the outside. So what can you sort of see of women? And of course, even there, you're not going into a completely obvious situation because as we all know, you can, you can enhance your breasts. You can wear padded bras, you can wear uplift bras, you can wear something that doesn't really show you've got breasts. You know, breasts are actually something which you perform. They're not body in that sort of neutral way. They are performative.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  So I quite like performative organs as a concept. Bits you're, bits you're showing off or not. Clitoris, well, um, so the whole debate about is there such a thing as the clitoris? I hadn't realized it was quite as big a debate as it is. So in the sixteenth century, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sixteenth, yeah, 16th century, you've got Rialdo Colombo discovers the clitoris. 1559, there's a date for your calendar.

• 12:09Liv Albert?

  How could you discover something that's the same word as it was like 2000 years earlier?

• 12:15Speaker 06

  Exactly. How can you discover this? And we've got things like Sappho's poetry where she talks about the little apple at the top of the tree, which the men can't quite reach, which is very clitoral, isn't it? Come on.

• 12:26Liv Albert?

  Well, and I've done perhaps a bizarre amount of research into the ancient Greek notion of the clitoris. And it means like little hill, right?

• 12:35Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 12:35Liv Albert?

  I love that. Yeah. I didn't know, but the little apple, Sappho, I'm going to have to go find that.

• 12:39Speaker 06

  Little apples as well, little hill, which is wonderful. So there's dear old Colombo going, oh, look, I've just found this thing. And he describes it in very graphic terms. It's, it's, I was, I was examining a living woman. So this is not dissection. And I found this oblong thing. And if you touch it, women go completely wild.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  And they send their seed in all directions. And you thought, whoa, this is, this sounds like quite fun, doesn't it? But once you've done this, once you've said, if you touch it, who's doing the touching? So what if the woman touches it on her own? Does that mean you don't actually need men anymore? So the clitoris gets quite tricky, really.

• 13:16Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 13:17Speaker 06

  Is it a good thing or is it not a good thing? But at the same time, you've got people like the great, very classically based anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who pictures himself on the title page of his book, The Fabrica, with Galen and Hippocrates, or possibly with Hippocrates and their assistricutes and Herophilus. You know, it's hard to know which, but people wearing togas, like they've gone to a toga party, really. People in togas are hanging out at the dissections of the 16th century man. I mean, he's clearly, you know, he's identifying with the classics all the way. He has images of the body where it's like a statue, sort of with arms and legs cut off. The whole sort of statue style of anatomy

• 13:59Speaker 06

  art, it's, it's, he's so classical. And he says, no, no such thing as a clitoris. It's, I found a few, but it's just like a freak.

• 14:08Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 14:09Speaker 06

  A sport of nature, you know, it happens occasionally, but don't worry, it's not serious.

• 14:14Liv Albert?

  This is the most Christianized thing, you know, like just comparing it to the ancient world where it's just like the, the debate is so tied to, you know, a Christian patriarchy and like the notions inherent in that. It's so interesting.

• 14:30Speaker 06

  I think it is. It's, of course, women don't have a thing like that, you know, and women are utterly.

• 14:34Liv Albert?

  They need a man.

• 14:36Speaker 06

  They need a man. They're utterly irrelevant. And of course, then you get, later on, you get the idea that women can have a clitoris, but it can be too large. And that again is quite classical because some of the ancient medical texts talk about what happens if your clitoris is too big.

• 14:49Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  And the danger is you'll end up trying to use it like men use their penis.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  So the penetrative clitoris, and that clearly worries people enormously.

• 14:59Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, I mean, we all know from the ancient world that penetration is the the most important part.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  It's all about that.

• 15:06Liv Albert?

  I have a running joke on on the show now, or it's not even a joke, it's just a thing I bring up far too often, but I have a theory that, you know, a lot of women, particularly in ancient Athens, where they were, you know, led a more strict life, is that they were just having sex with their friends all the time because the men didn't consider it sex. They were just like, yo, go hang out with your girlfriends, you know, I know you can't, you know, have any issue because there's nothing to penetrate you.

• 15:30Speaker 06

  So that's fine. So there's no issue about having illegitimate children or anything like that. It's fine, do what you like. So the idea that a woman is actually using it to penetrate was considered very strange.

• 15:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 06

  And of course, it's also interesting for me because this was othered in a very, a very racial way. So the ancient Greek medical texts that talk about this always say it's someone other than Greeks who do this. It's these funny foreign women. Funny foreign women doing weird things. And that's, that's just, that's very Greek, actually, isn't it?

• 16:01Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  Funny foreign, very funny foreign.

• 16:04Liv Albert?

  Anyone who's doing something weird has to be foreign. That's sort of the general rule. Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So you've got Greek medical texts that talk about removing the clitoris, which is pretty gross to read about, but it's not clear what they're actually talking about. I mean, they could be talking about the labia because sometimes the terminology is a bit vague.

• 16:23Speaker 06

  There's this word in Latin, crista, which means crest, like a head, like a cockerel's crest, I guess. And what is used for clitoris, but that's sort of not just one thing, it's quite labial.

• 16:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  So you do want to have time what they're talking about, but the idea that you could have one that's too big and you have to have it removed, that's definitely classical.

• 16:43Liv Albert?

  And horrifying. Wow.

• 16:45Speaker 06

  And horrifying, yes. So, yeah, clitoris is, um, then there's hymens. Well, you know, Virgin Mary, does she have a hymen? Does anyone have a hymen? I mean, now we'd say, yes, of course, the clitoris exists and it's much more extensive than we used to think. Um, and it wraps itself around the vagina and the whole distinguishing clitoral orgasm from vaginal orgasm is kind of ridiculous. That's Freud's line on things that you should have only vaginal orgasms if you're a proper woman.

• 17:13Liv Albert?

  Oh Freud.

• 17:13Speaker 06

  But I know, I know. But since the whole, it's all wrapped up together, you can't separate them, can you?

• 17:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 06

  It's completely potty. So the whole vaginal thing, while we're at it, Princess Marie Bonaparte.

• 17:26Liv Albert?

  Oh gosh.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  Okay, Princess Marie Bonaparte, fascinating woman, had the idea that her whole problem with sex wasn't that she was married to a guy who was homosexual, which you might have thought was the problem. But no, her problem with sex, she reckoned, was that her clitoris wasn't near enough to her vagina.

• 17:46Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  So she put a lot of effort into having operations to move her clitoris.

• 17:51Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  Which, you know, again, it's the idea that it's this tiny little thing and you move it around, when actually it's a huge thing, and it's bigger than a penis, and it extends inside you and it wraps around your vagina. And, you know, it's one thing. So we would say clitoris, real and big. But hipper hymen, mm, kind of dodgy, not everyone's got one. So what anyway? But of course, in other periods of history, it's been all about, you know,

• 18:16Liv Albert?

  Oh my gosh.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  You've got to have that moment where your hymen is broken and you bleed and you become a proper woman.

• 18:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. So now we're going hymen, no. But then you've got people, particularly, I'm afraid, in conservative, evangelical, American, Christian groups.

• 18:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 06

  Who are, yeah, with the whole purity culture thing.

• 18:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  You know, and saying that actually, even if you have lost your virginity, you can get it back, including growing a new hymen. And I quote in the book, an evangelist guy who's saying, I've even seen these growing back. And you're like, how did you see that? That's a bit gross, isn't it?

• 18:55Speaker 06

  What are you doing looking there? Come on.

• 18:59Liv Albert?

  Oh, only a man.

• 19:01Speaker 06

  I know, it's horrendous, it's horrendous. I mean, I can see the argument, if you're a woman living in a purity culture sort of context, whether that's Christian or another religious context, and you've had sex, and you're really worried that you're going to get married and somehow he's going to know you've had sex already. I mean, for a start, if you can't talk about that, should you be getting married? But, you know, okay, there's a cultural thing, they will leave that aside. But if you don't know whether or not he's going to react like that, you know, should you be marrying this man? But then you might think that actually the answer is to do something to reconstruct your hymen. Um. So there's throughout history, there are lovely little remedies for constrictives, which sort of make your vagina tighter. Those are in the ancient world. And then there are

• 19:46Speaker 06

  things like putting something red up there so that it comes out. So people think, oh, blood. And putting a piece of raw meat inside you. I mean, really, the whole thing is, yeah, it's, it's, you know, I sometimes wonder why I wrote this book, but

• 20:01Liv Albert?

  I am obsessed with it already.

• 20:07Liv Albert?

  I, I didn't expect, I mean, I knew this was gonna be fun, but I'm already like, oh, my gosh, of course, this is gonna be the wildest topic. I, I mean, the ancient world, I'm just obsessed with the things they did. But the rationale is, is so interesting. Just like, as a, just point of interest, do you know, I imagine you do, how it became, you know, that, that the god of marriage, hymen, became, took the name, or like the body part took the name?

• 20:34Speaker 06

  Yes, I do go into that in the book, because it's fascinating. Hyman with a capital H, as opposed to hymen with a small h. So hymen with a small h is membrane. And you have membranes, membranes throughout the human bodies, membranes in the eye, in the heart, that they talk about in ancient medicine. They don't talk about a membrane down there. They talk about other membranes. But hymen with a capital H, god of marriage, I think it's about uniting, it's about joining. So the hymen, the membrane, sort of joins two bits of the body.

• 21:00Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  And he joins two people in marriage.

• 21:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 06

  So I think that's what it's about. But it's very misleading, because people say, oh, of course, there was a hymen in the ancient world. He was a god of marriage. Yeah, that's different, though.

• 21:10Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 06

  A membrane.

• 21:13Liv Albert?

  To me, I would, I mean, and perhaps this is my bias coming through, but like, I would assume that connecting it with, you know, the, the act of sex, that, that whole, that whole realm would be more of a later Christian, like, association, because they were the ones

• 21:30Liv Albert?

  Who cared about that.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think they do. But then it's also caring in the ancient world. So there's this wonderful passage in the Hippocrates and also in Aristotle, same reference. That when you bleed, it's like a sacrificed animal. Menstrual blood is like the blood of sacrifice. And I've always found that fascinating because to me, it's suggesting maybe an alternative way of thinking about your body. As an ancient Greek woman, because obviously sacrifice is good. It connects gods and humans. Obviously, animal sacrifice shedding blood is good because of that connection. So if your body is shedding blood, are you somehow being the bridge between earth and heaven?

• 22:14Speaker 06

  Is this is this way of saying that menstruation is really positive? Not something to be dreaded, because if you look at history, it's the way people have talked about it. There's so many negative terms.

• 22:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  I was talking the other day on another podcast about Maud Royden, who's a woman who lived in the early part of the 20th century. And who talked about it as the fiend.

• 22:37Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 22:38Speaker 06

  And you think, ooh, but then you've got lots of medieval and later texts that talk about menstruation as flowers. Flowers come before fruit. And isn't that a nicer image?

• 22:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, it's funny because like on a personal level, I understand calling it a fiend, but that's because of like my, you know, that's how I see it. And I don't want its eventual purpose of flowers. So I'm just gonna have to live with the fiend.

• 23:02Speaker 06

  You're right. You want to be fruit free.

• 23:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I would forever. Yes.

• 23:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:06Liv Albert?

  But yeah, it's interesting to have like, I mean, the two sides because, I mean, certainly for a lot of, a lot of people, you know, who menstruate, it is a ridiculously painful thing. That doctors don't care about. And then sometimes it's not so bad at all for others. You know, so it's interesting to have the different.

• 23:23Liv Albert?

  Frames.

• 23:24Speaker 06

  It is, isn't it? And then if you think about women in Greek myth, you think about someone like Ephigenia.

• 23:29Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 23:29Speaker 06

  To be sacrificed by her father to get a good wind for the fleet. Actual sacrifice. So to say your blood is like the blood of a sacrificed beast. But the same time as having myths in which women are actually physically sacrificed, their blood is shed. There's something really very interesting and weird going on there, isn't there?

• 23:49Liv Albert?

  Well, and especially when you connect it with, you know, that she believed she was marrying Achilles. So then you have like a the similar kind of, you know, hymen with a capital H.

• 23:57Speaker 06

  Exactly. So yeah, bleeding, but not that sort of bleeding love.

• 24:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I thought you'd like an Ephigenia moment.

• 24:07Liv Albert?

  Oh, well, of course. I mean, all of it. And it's, I really didn't see this connection coming, but this is where I haven't yet really talked about this much on the show, but I've been researching some of this for a novel.

• 24:19Speaker 06

  Brilliant.

• 24:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, very, very like somewhat bizarre kind of way. That's why I like have learned the the clitoris reference and but I I read, I'm trying to remember what the source would have been. I don't, I don't know. Um, but I know I was reading something where some ancient Greek source was describing menstruation as like, or it was like as if, you know, the the body is filling up with blood and the pressure is like the issue. And so, yeah, like the hymen relieves pressure in some way. I'm gonna forget the exact quote because it was not relevant to my work.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. So this is taking me to my absolutely favorite ancient Greek text, which is the Hippocratic Treatise on the Disease of Virgins, Peripathenion.

• 25:01Liv Albert?

  Oh, I probably was just reading Hippocratic.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  Disease of young girls, whatever you want to call it, how do you translate pathenoi, you know, big issues there. So that's the one where they talk about how if your mouth of exit is not open, and we don't know whether that means the mouth of the womb or the mouth out of the body or what, if your mouth of exit is not open and your blood starts to build up because of the food and basically you're gross, food and the growth of the body is what they say. So you're eating and drinking as a woman, that becomes blood more than it does for men. Because women are wet and spongy. They have flesh like sponges which absorbs all this fluid and they've got to get rid of it. That's the sort of basic ancient Greek gynecology, stage one, really. Greek gynecology 101, women are wet and spongy. Good, got that sorted. So if you're wet and spongy.

• 25:49Liv Albert?

  Michaela, take note.

• 25:49Speaker 06

  It's not bad, is it? It's not bad. So that's it. Women are wet and spongy. And if you're at puberty, you're growing more. So you've got more spongy flesh in your body than you did have. And you're still eating and drinking lots. So it sort of starts to build up. And then because your mouth of exit isn't open, wherever that is, the blood starts to move up your body and it gets stuck at the hypochondria, which is sort of the diaphragm area. And because the author of this text believes the diaphragm is the seat of consciousness, not the brain, but the diaphragm, you start to lose your marbles in basic British terminology. You start to go completely barking mad and you start seeing strange things. You have weird visions.

• 26:33Speaker 06

  You fall in love with death. There's an erotic fascination with death in this text. Fascinating. And you start to do weird things like jump down wells. You think, okay, or hang yourself. Now, so that's interesting. So that's two methods of dying, which don't involve bloodshed. It's like you're denying that your body wants to shed blood. You're either strangling yourself somehow, hanging yourself, no blood, or you're jumping down a well, drowning, no blood. It's like these girls are saying, I don't want to bleed. I don't want to do that. And you can understand their point? Because once they bleed, they're going to get married off.

• 27:12Liv Albert?

  It's so interesting though, because like that, I mean, that, that is absolutely all relevant, but it also screams to me of, you know, premenstrual depression, just whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Michaela's texting this exact thing. Like I, it, it sounds like, yeah, extreme depression and suicidal thoughts. I'm, Michaela can decide whether she wants to keep this in, but it's hilarious timing because literally yesterday I was complaining to her about cramps. And then we just like had to talk about depression symptoms and anxiety symptoms. And yeah, it just sounds like he's describing women who have killed themselves because they don't have access to like, you know, care for that. Oh my gosh.

• 27:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's an extraordinary text. And this is the one where they say that the cure for this disease is marriage. Well, you know, what do you expect a Hippocratic Greek writer to say? The cure is marriage. Okay. But then says, but women think that they're healed of this disease when they dedicate their garments to the goddess Artemis.

• 28:16Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 28:16Speaker 06

  And you've got this very, very rare, unique, almost reference in ancient Greek medicine to what women do versus what men think they should do.

• 28:26Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 28:27Speaker 06

  So women see this as a religious problem and the answer is Artemis.

• 28:31Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 28:32Speaker 06

  Now, those of us who like Artemis would say the answer to everything is Artemis, but Artemis is the way to go. And so you you give her garments.

• 28:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  And then she will release your blood and you'll be you'll be fine again.

• 28:45Liv Albert?

  Wow. What are what are your theories on this connection to Artemis and like what? Because that's amazing.

• 28:50Speaker 06

  So there is a reference, the first thing I ever published years ago, nineteen eighty three or something ridiculous, was an article called Bound to Bleed, Artemis and Greek Women. I think of my titles in the bath and that was a good one.

• 29:03Liv Albert?

  That's amazing.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  Bound to Bleed, and it's about strangulation and it's about the strangled Artemis. There's a reference, just one reference to one of the many forms of Artemis as the strangled Artemis.

• 29:13Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  And I'm thinking, yeah, the Artemis who does not shed blood. That's really relevant, really relevant to these women who are not wanting to shed blood or who are wanting to shed blood, but it's not coming out and it's building up and something's going on there. And then you can link that to archaeology and to the site at Brawron, where there are lists of garments that women dedicated to the goddess Artemis. They did it. And we know there's other references to them dedicating garments when they've given birth. So Artemis as getting you through another transition in your life, the birth transition. But the idea that that actually they're giving garments not just when they've given birth,

• 29:58Speaker 06

  but in order to get through their first period, that's really powerful to me. And there are whole lists of these garments, you know, with what color they are, with whether they're wonderful, actually one is frog green. I'm just imagining what frog green outfit would look like. Frog green, frog green outfits. And they're giving these things and these are all listed in terms of whether they're sort of displayed at the sanctuary.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  You can walk past and see these garments on display and think, oh, that was given by a woman who had this problem. And some of them are described as ragged, like they've been there a long time, or maybe they were given when they were quite old. You know, maybe they were given later in life. This whole culture of women giving their garments to the goddess. I find absolutely fascinating.

• 30:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, like, do we know what what women used, you know, for their periods in the ancient world? Like, was it, could it have also been that? Like?

• 30:58Speaker 06

  Yep. Well, funnily enough, there was a, one ancient scholar in the 19th century, I think it was, who suggested that the rags that women were giving were actually the menstrual rags.

• 31:08Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  And he got in a terrible state as a man would by imagining these sort of great wooden chests full of menstrual rags, just sitting around in the sanctuary and surely not, you know, who knows? So rags is the answer, clearly. We don't know, obviously, things like how how much women did bleed in antiquity, whether their diet was so rubbish that they didn't really have much in the way of menstrual periods, just something quite scanty.

• 31:35Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 31:36Speaker 06

  So that's possible, or that they just simply, you know, stayed at home, bled into their clothes, also possible.

• 31:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 06

  But most cultures, you know, it's rags, it's old clothes, which you somehow sort of stuff between your legs and tie around and hope to goodness that nothing goes wrong.

• 31:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 06

  So, yeah, it's not a, not a thrilling story, really. You get people claiming, oh, you know, they invented tampons. You think, mm, I don't honestly think so. No evidence for that whatsoever.

• 32:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know why anyone would assume that without evidence.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  No, was that a logical thing?

• 32:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 06

  Don't know. So, yeah, so that's got to Artemis, I'm afraid. Well, you know, there, you can't get out again.

• 32:14Liv Albert?

  Oh, shucks. I won't, I won't try to fight it.

• 32:19Liv Albert?

  No, I, I mean, I imagine Artemis is pretty heavily associated with like a lot of things in your book because, I mean, well, and actually, even before we leave the, that bit about dedicating things to her. And imagining her as, as, you know, helping when it comes to this whole like, you know, blood buildup thing that they believed.

• 32:43Liv Albert?

  It seems to me that it could also, and maybe this is a stretch because I want it to be this, but it seems to me like Artemis to me also is so connected with, you know, whatever level of under the surface, you know, homosexual love there was between women in the ancient world. It's obviously never explicit because those women didn't write these stories down. But to me, it feels like it could be connected with that as well, where it's like, if they believe this is an actual issue, but they don't intend to have penetrative sex with the man, you know, maybe they're also going to Artemis and there's something aligned with that.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, so that takes you into the myth of Artemis and Callisto, doesn't it? Callisto, one of the nymphs of Artemis, presumably the whole point of the deal is if you're, if you're one of Artemis's nymphs following her, you hang out with the virgin goddess, you jolly well stay virgin, and that means boys and girls. Or of course, it could be that you, you're actually part of a group where relationships between the women in it are absolutely fine, but it's men that are the problem.

• 33:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah, without the penetrative sex, is it technically sex in the ancient world?

• 33:46Speaker 06

  Technically sex, no, exactly. And you're not going to get pregnant, so that's all right. But Callisto, of course, is raped by Zeus. Now, you might say that's not her fault, but nevertheless, it seems to be her fault. So Callisto gets pregnant and is trying to conceal this, trying, you know, hiding a pregnancy from a goddess. It's not going to work well, is it? And Artemis finds out that she is pregnant and gets very cross and turns her into a bear.

• 34:13Speaker 06

  And she becomes a constellation in the sky. But she does give birth beforehand. She gives birth to Arkas. Arkas, like arc toy bears, there's a lot of bear stuff going on, but bears are so interesting because they're also maternal. And remember, Artemis is also, you know, goddess of young things.

• 34:34Speaker 06

  She looks after the young. So bears, yeah, and that, oh gosh, that takes you to the bears of Brauron. Yeah. Whoa, love the bears of Brauron. So the young girls who are dedicated to Artemis, when they're sort of around the time they might start their first period, or maybe a bit younger than that, different sources give you different dates, maybe five till 10. But ideally, you're going to be marrying in your 13th year, in your 14th year. So that's age 13. So it's preparing for marriage perhaps. And they go to Brauron, they act the bear in a ceremony called Arkteia, and Arkthos is bear. And they act the bear to prepare for marriage, which is like, how do these words make a sentence?

• 35:19Speaker 06

  And they talk, the sources talk about you wear a saffron robe.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  They talk about putting a robe on or maybe taking a robe off. So it's really hard to know what's going on because this is a women's ritual. You know, you're not getting a big discussion of it in male sources. It's what women do. And then the stuff that you find from Brauron, little statues of girls, bits of broken pots showing girls running. So are they running towards something or running away from something? And then the great fragment that has what appears to be a woman wearing a bear mask with her hands raised up. And what is that? Is that the priestess dressed as a bear? Yeah. And is that bear, woo, scary, gonna jump on you?

• 36:03Speaker 06

  Or is that bear a maternal bear? Because ancient Greek and Roman natural history talks about the bear as a nurturing animal that literally licks its cubs into shape. Yeah, wow. Incredible image. So is Artemis the bear actually scary? Or is the whole point of Brauron to say, you thought bears were scary, but Artemis is more than that. Artemis is a nurturing mother bear. And she will look after you and she will shape your child in your womb. And you don't need to worry. So much going on.

• 36:38Liv Albert?

  Well, and I mean, Browron's so interesting because it was exclusive to women.

• 36:42Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 36:43Liv Albert?

  And Artemis generally, to me, seems like a goddess where the sources we have are, you know, fairly likely to be manipulated by the people who preserved them. Or, you know, the various men that were involved in order for them to be preserved. You know, so then you have things from Browron that aren't like that, that are just surviving material objects. And you kind of get that, like what you're saying, this, this different kind of idea about bears and, and the maternal nature and everything. And like, yeah, maybe they weren't scary in that context. But even, you know, the story of, of Artemis and Callisto, to me, I, I also think, you know, in any kind of detail, it only really survives in Ovid.

• 37:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:27Liv Albert?

  So we know, you know, it was older for sure, but the version we have is obviously like so skewed. Um, so to me, that story has always seemed like, you know, that, that element where Callisto is blamed for Zeus's rape of her. It by Artemis, that feels to me like men infusing their fear of paternity into the story, where the story was probably that Artemis loved Callisto and she was raped, right?

• 37:56Speaker 06

  I think that's a much better way of looking at it. Because as you say, when you've got something which is only in one source and it's Ovid, so it's lots of detail, lots and lots of detail. And, you know, we know he plays with myths, of course, everyone plays with myths. Everyone tells them.

• 38:10Liv Albert?

  Well, everyone does. And then, but Ovid so specifically, you know, especially by being literally not Greek, you know, he, I try to explain it to my listeners is like, Ovid is writing, like, you know, Ovid is, is writing a remake 600 years later, right? He's, he's Baz Luhrmann writing Romeo and Juliet. It, it, it's different. It's showy. It's very intentional in the way it's formed versus, you know, the actual mythological origins and, and how they were developed and then eventually preserved.

• 38:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And it's when you've got the combination of something like that, a very literary account. And then you've got something as fragmentary as a little bit of a pot from Browron with a bear priestess possibly on it. How do you put that together? How do you make that into a story?

• 38:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Speaker 06

  And then you've got the other story, which is the one about the bear at Browron. That once upon a time, a girl was playing with a tame bear who hung out at the sanctuary like tame bears didn't. And and the bear scratches her and her brother, her brothers kill the bear in revenge for it hurting her. And that's a really bad mistake because Artemis then sends a plague and people um give birth only to lose their baby and your crops fail and it's all disaster all round. And the answer there is to send your daughters to brow on to act the bear. Now, what's that about? So the bear that scratches you, can you link that with the bear priestess on the vase paintings?

• 39:44Speaker 06

  That one, the posing, you know, the claws up and so on. Is that what's going on? And is the message actually when Artemis the bear scratches you? Right? So another menstrual possibility here. When you bleed as a result of Artemis the bear, do not be afraid. This go with Artemis, go with the flow, literally go with the flow here. Go with Artemis, accept what Artemis is doing because it's in your interests. And you will, as a result of this, you will be able to have a baby because remember, babies in ancient Greek thought are made from the blood of the woman. In the womb. So your blood, your menstrual blood, which you're thinking, ew, this is ghastly.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  It will become a baby, which for an ancient Greek woman is presumably seen as a good thing. It'll become a baby and Artemis will see you through that pregnancy. And at the end of it, again, you can give her garments to say thank you to her. It's all terribly tied up, I think, the Artemis blood menstruation, birth thing.

• 40:48Liv Albert?

  I I am utterly fascinated by all of this.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  It's fun, isn't it? And then, of course, just to go really weird, you've got Artemis of Ephesus.

• 40:56Liv Albert?

  Oh, gosh, oh, my God, please, I.

• 40:57Speaker 06

  I know, I know. The many busted Artemis who who apparently most people now seem to think it's not breasts at all that are all over her. It's bull's scrotums.

• 41:05Liv Albert?

  Interesting. I recently was told the theory by a guest um uh that they were more like beehives.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  Yep, the beehive theory. Yep, I like that more.

• 41:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it definitely seems more likely than.

• 41:18Speaker 06

  I prefer bees.

• 41:20Liv Albert?

  It also would be like, it's just explicitly more connected with Artemis and like, yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 06

  But I think the bull scrotal sacs theory is just so extraordinarily funny.

• 41:31Liv Albert?

  It feels like a real stretch, but it's definitely funny. It feels like maybe, just maybe, a man came up with that theory. I don't know.

• 41:38Speaker 06

  Yes, I know. I'm not an expert on bull scrotal sacs, you know, to be able to be definitive about that. But they don't look much like breasts, do they, really?

• 41:47Liv Albert?

  It also feels like a real, like, you have to have a real knowledge of bulls.

• 41:53Speaker 06

  Too much information.

• 41:54Liv Albert?

  Absolutely. That feels like you, sir, are maybe, you know, working through some stuff that you're putting on Artemis of Ephesus.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, please don't do that. Please don't do that. But then Artemis of Ephesus becomes a symbol for all sorts of breastfeeding scenarios through history. So the Foundling Hospital, the Quorum Foundling Hospital in London, which was the place where Handel's Messiah was performed in order to raise money for the Quorum Orphanage. And Quorum's symbol was the woman with many breasts, which is Artemis again. And there's this real issues here about breastfeeding, which I go into in the book. Breastfeeding is the oldest profession known to woman.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  It sort of seems to beat sex work.

• 42:43Liv Albert?

  It's also like, it feels much kinder to women.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  Yes, it does. It certainly does. But then you read of some women who breastfed, you know, dozens of kids over their life. Several at once, you know, because they had so much milk. Because if you, apparently, I've not tried this one, but apparently if you breastfeed, you keep going on breastfeeding, you just keep going on breastfeeding. As long as you don't stop, you don't stop. So there are examples of women, you know, quite late in life, sort of grandmother types, still hiring themselves out as breast milk substitutes. But the oldest contracts in the world for women's work are breastfeeding contracts.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  And that's so interesting because we've got these from Egypt, from the time of Greek occupation. And it's very much about two men contracting with each other.

• 43:33Speaker 06

  Because of course, the other ones who sign up, sign the contracts and things, they contract. So the, the one man will give his, give his wife, who's breastfeeding really, to the other one to breastfeed their child. Which means that the richer guy, the guy who's employing the wet nurse, can then go on having sex with his wife without thinking about the fact that, you know, she's, she's lactating. Just sort of regard her as just somehow never did give birth. It's something about preserving the shape of your breasts, perhaps.

• 44:03Liv Albert?

  Oh my gosh.

• 44:04Speaker 06

  Uh, I know, it's not very nice. But meanwhile, the person who, who's provided his wife as the wet nurse, how, what happens to her child? If, if her child's dead, one can understand this, and that was obviously going to happen in the ancient world. But is she trying to maintain breastfeeding on two children? Is she not feeding one as much as the other because she's contracted to feed this one? So there's not much left for the other one? I don't know. I think there's, there's quite a lot of interesting exploitation issues going on there.

• 44:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 06

  Potentially. But it is, you know, it is a big thing and you contract to do it. And you swear when you're going to become a wet nurse, that you will not have sex with anyone. So that's the other thing. You're paying, you're, you're taking the money in order for your wife to breastfeed someone else's child. And you can't have sex for the while she's doing that because that would spoil the milk. It'll feel like you're letting her out for sex work, doesn't it? Or something. It's not sex work, it's milk work, but it's kind of odd.

• 45:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, it's still this like very distinct ownership of a woman's body and just in a different form.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's exactly it. It's ownership. Um, and the idea that sex somehow curdles your breast milk was something which was in the ancient world. Um, and again, continued quite a long time. It's 18th, 19th century texts that you get people saying, well, actually, you can have sex when you're breastfeeding.

• 45:30Liv Albert?

  Oh my gosh.

• 45:31Speaker 06

  It's all right, you know, it won't damage the child. Um, quite late in the day. And then there's always interesting stuff about breast milk in the ancient world and how they didn't believe you should breastfeed immediately. Whereas we think you should because colostrum, the first product of the breast is the stuff with all the useful immune system boosting. So your baby is likely to be healthy if it's breastfed pretty soon. But in the ancient world, they'd say, oh, no, you mustn't do that nasty, sort of thick, plotted stuff. It's not like milk at all. Oh, no. What you need is a woman who is already breastfeeding to breastfeed your child until your wife gets to the point where she can breastfeed. And you think, this is just weird

• 46:16Speaker 06

  that something we think is absolutely beneficial to health, they thought was absolutely negative to health.

• 46:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 06

  It's it's a useful reminder that, you know, there is no simple progressive view of history where we just learn more and more and it all gets better and better. It's it's much more complex than that.

• 46:33Liv Albert?

  Well, and certainly when it comes to the bodies that men loved at police, like it's so distinctly to the, you know, I I say this just because of the the power that it had, but like to the lesser group, right? Like it's.

• 46:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:47Liv Albert?

  I mean, it's like how even now the care and the like, the help you get for things like endometriosis and PMDD and stuff is like non-existent. It's so much of just like, no, you're fine, right? This doesn't hurt. You're you're fine. And so to think that that the place we're at now is like, really progressive comparatively is. I'm surprising, but not great.

• 47:13Speaker 06

  No, well, you know, as I don't endometriosis suffer in my youth before I had everything removed, I certainly had that jolly experience of going to the doctor and being told, if you have a baby, you'll be fine. And you think, hello, I don't even have a boyfriend. How am I supposed to get a baby?

• 47:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  And I won't be fine. I might have less endometriosis, but then I'll have a baby. And that's going to be a lot more of an issue in terms of organizing my life than even than having endometriosis and having to plan my life around my menstrual cycles.

• 47:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  And then who knows, it's gonna work, you know, really.

• 47:44Liv Albert?

  And it it. You know, it just, uh, yeah, it reminds me of like how, you know, a lot of, a lot of women who want to have like, you know, just not have babies. I'm gonna forget all the technical terms, but like, you know, and go in to get, have the tube side or whatever. And that, so many doctors will be like, well, but you're not married yet, so we can't do it. Or if they are married, you'll be, they'll be like, well, we need your husband's permission.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:10Liv Albert?

  And you know, but they'll, like, it's just, it's utterly, yeah, I mean, i- it's, it's fascinating to me in how much it's just like, still garbage. Um, but of course, like-

• 48:20Speaker 06

  It's a polite way of putting it, right?

• 48:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  It is complete garbage. It is complete garbage. And if you say, well, actually, I would really rather have a hysterectomy. Oh, no, you couldn't possibly do that. You'll change your mind, you know?

• 48:31Liv Albert?

  No, exactly.

• 48:32Speaker 06

  It's, oh, you can't reverse that. No, I know.

• 48:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's the point.

• 48:36Speaker 06

  Actually, yes, exactly. I mean, it took a long time to get diagnosed with endometriosis. And then it took a long time. It's really hard. It's years, isn't it? It's still years. Seven years or something ridiculous.

• 48:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So I can only imagine, you know, yeah, that when you were going through it, it was like even worse. Oh my god, yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 06

  It was even worse. And then, you know, you then read all the garbage history around endometriosis, which is fascinating. So, obviously, another big Greek thing is the wandering womb.

• 49:04Liv Albert?

  Oh, yes. Oh, my god, please. I, I don't know enough about that. I know the term, so I-

• 49:09Speaker 06

  Well, I can, I can take you through the wandering womb. So there's a, there's a theory out there that says, oh, it's all endometriosis, because that's womb tissue that's in the wrong place. No, it's not. Wandering womb is not womb tissue in the wrong place. It is the whole womb going for a walk.

• 49:23Liv Albert?

  As one does.

• 49:23Speaker 06

  As one does. Tissue in funny places is a very interesting topic. So it's not just, um, endometrial tissue, womb tissue that can turn up in funny places, including in the navel. I know someone who had it in their navel.

• 49:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  I know. I've heard of it going far worse places. Like, don't go there. Don't think about brains. It's too unpleasant. But endo can go in all sorts of places, but so can breast tissue. There's this wonderful thing called accessory breasts, which sounds a lot like a handbag or something, doesn't it? Oh, my clutch bag. Oh, no, it's my accessory breast. And accessory breasts can turn up anywhere, um, men and women.

• 49:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  There are examples of people having an accessory breast, complete with nipple, on their leg.

• 50:04Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 50:05Speaker 06

  Bodies are weird. Let's just keep that one in mind. So back to wandering wombs and endometriosis. In wandering wombs, the whole womb moves. It moves because it's dry, usually, in ancient medicine.

• 50:19Liv Albert?

  It doesn't want to be wet and spongy.

• 50:20Speaker 06

  Well, it's because, you know, wet, spongy body, dry womb, not happy. So it goes around to try and find something which is wet. So that's why it quite likes going to the liver, which is obviously a very blood-filled organ. So it moves up and gets stuck there. But wombs also swivel in ancient medicine. They just turn around completely, which is why you get my favourite Hippocratic aphorism, which is in a woman whose menstrual period is suppressed, vomiting blood is a good thing.

• 50:48Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 50:49Speaker 06

  So, yeah, so if you're thinking about it, okay. If you're thinking women are full of all this extra blood and this sponginess, and they've got to somehow get rid of it, it's not going down. What happens? It just builds up and it builds up and it rots and it causes disease and it puts pressure on all your organs, back to what you were saying earlier about pressure. So the answer is to get it out somehow. So if you're vomiting blood, well, at least it's got out.

• 51:11Liv Albert?

  Oh, good. I'm sure that the women who are vomiting blood fared very well.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  It's great, isn't it, really? I'm sure they felt so much better as a result. So nosebleeds also, nosebleeds, and also blood from any orifice. But that goes on into the 17th and 18th centuries. And I even have a 19th century case I know of, where a woman who was bleeding from her ears, they thought that was suppressed menstrual blood.

• 51:35Speaker 06

  So, yeah, we think of wandering wombs as weird. It's actually far more weird out there than that.

• 51:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  But wandering wombs, it's, it's a sort of physical thing. It's not mental. It's not, you know, you're feeling a bit strange or something. It's actual physical movement of your womb getting stuck somewhere and pressing on your other organs.

• 51:58Liv Albert?

  So they just use this as like a kind of explanation for a lot of things?

• 52:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, explanation for a lot of things. So if you're a woman and you've got a pain in your shoulder.

• 52:06Liv Albert?

  Oh, of course.

• 52:07Speaker 06

  One of the possibilities is your womb has got stuck in your shoulder.

• 52:09Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 52:11Speaker 06

  And they were aware of the diaphragm. They were aware things couldn't actually get that high. But you can sort of get around that by saying, well, if you're going to say, oh, but what about the diaphragm? Yes, but maybe the womb could press on the diaphragm in such a way the pressure then gets passed up the body until it gets to your shoulder or your throat or whatever.

• 52:30Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 52:31Speaker 06

  And then there's a theory, which is generally not the ancient, the main ancient world theory, but it's a supplementary one, that your womb is releasing vapors. So even if your womb isn't moving, the vapors from it are sort of pouring up through your body and they're the things that are poisoning other bits of you. So lots of theories and it's hard to actually just go the wandering womb because there's also wandering fumes and swiveling wombs and all sorts going on there.

• 53:02Liv Albert?

  Well, you're you're reminding me too of, um, I I did a double major in classics and English Lit. And so

• 53:07Speaker 06

  What a combo.

• 53:08Liv Albert?

  I know, right? It was, I mean, they they worked really well together. Um, but you know, a huge part of my education was in English literature. And so I'm just thinking of like all the Victorian

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:18Liv Albert?

  stuff of what's the, what's the word they liked? I mean, I know it's, it might be humors, but they're, you know, they had women's, all the different issues, they would say, you know, of what, what is a woman going through with that crazy body of hers, you know? It's timeless.

• 53:36Speaker 06

  And there's the Victorian idea that because you've only got a limited amount of blood in your body from what you make from eating and drinking and store up in your spongy flesh and then it goes to your womb and comes out. If you use your brain as a woman, you won't have enough blood left to make a baby. So you can't, this is, this is an argument, genuine argument against women's education in the Victorian period. You didn't have enough blood to supply your brain and your womb.

• 54:01Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  So women, you know, if you're using your brain, you are putting the race in danger.

• 54:06Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. Well, okay.

• 54:07Speaker 06

  Whether anyone would listen to an argument like that is not the matter. I think if you're using your brain, you would rapidly see there are holes in that argument.

• 54:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Michaela, please.

• 54:18Liv Albert?

  Uh, I just have a quick question. So I was, um, I was thinking of how like, um, in this sort of way of like women when they're sick and they're ill and how it's their, their, uh, sort of their sexual organs are being almost held responsible for their illness. I'm like, does this pop up when they discuss mental illnesses as well? Or is

• 54:37Liv Albert?

  This a purely female thing, really?

• 54:40Speaker 06

  It's, I think, yeah, it's a purely female thing. Women are just more influenced by this. Sure, both men and women have fluids that wander around their bodies and can get stuck and so on. But with women, it's all very much dominated by blood. And blood and therefore menstruation. And that's really what the female body is all about, is a machine to process that blood. And because women are bleeding every month, there's something interesting going on there. As in, if they don't bleed, there's a problem. Which, of course, we all know, actually menstrual cycles are not 28 days. If they are, well, that's lovely, but they usually aren't. But they, the ancients tie this to the moon and the moon cycle.

• 55:25Speaker 06

  And the moon has a regular pattern, so women should too, but actually they don't. And therefore you've got all these expectations about what a woman's body should be doing. Which women's bodies are never going to be able to meet. And that's, that's a rather depressing thought, isn't it? That you just can never be the thing that you're supposed to be, but there's also-

• 55:45Liv Albert?

  According to the men.

• 55:47Speaker 06

  According to the men, but there's also a plus, there's a plus here, which is that the Hippocratic writers say that in some types of illness, women have a health advantage because of their womb. Because in addition to being able to lose things through your nose or your mouth or whatever, you can lose things through your vagina. So that means if you've got a buildup of some other dodgy substance in your body, you can possibly pass it out in your, with your period. So you can purge your body more effectively. So there's a Hippocratic passage that talks about how a particular fever, when it affected women, they got better more quickly and they're more likely to survive because they have the extra orifice to get rid of bad stuff. So there, you see, there's a plus, there's always a plus.

• 56:34Liv Albert?

  I just, I wish I was surprised by any of this, like I'm, I'm loving it all, but it's like, and I'm, it's like, it's all new information, but you know, there's just that level of like, I feel like nothing when it comes to men policing women's bodies can surprise me anymore.

• 56:50Speaker 06

  I think that's a fair comment, actually. There isn't anything, but somehow, I don't know, wandering wounds and nosebleeds that are menstrual and things like that does kind of, just kind of worry me.

• 57:01Liv Albert?

  Well, and they're uniquely entertaining, at least, as they're nice to learn about.

• 57:19Liv Albert?

  This episode is brought to you by Quince. You know, the drill. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. I have been speaking into a microphone about Quince for a while now, and I have no complaints. I have a bunch of their stuff. I've got a couple cute sweaters that, I mean, it's nearing sweater season, so those will be back in the rotation anytime now. And I have this leather bag that I absolutely love. It's like this braided leather, and I use it like basically every day. Because that's the thing, they have really great basics.

• 58:02Liv Albert?

  Like, they have really great things that you can wear with so many other things. Just the options are endless. And as the weather gets colder, like all the sweaters in my closet, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves, to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. And of course, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And if we haven't learned anything in the last 10 years, isn't it just getting rid of the middlemen, you know? Making things more affordable.

• 58:45Liv Albert?

  So find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was me. Let's talk about myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show we recommend.

• 59:17Liv Albert?

  Information ecosystem, it can be easy to hear the same voices over and over. I'm Mary Harris, host of What Next from Slate.com, and I do not want to hear the same voices over and over. I want to hear from the upstarts. Hassan, Adam, welcome to the show.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I disavow myself all the time. Every day I wake up, I'm like, I disavow myself.

• 59:38Liv Albert?

  I want to hear from the people on the ground.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  I videoed one ICE detainment. One of the ICE agents walked up and tried to hand me a little plastic Jesus.

• 59:48Liv Albert?

  And I want to hear from tomorrow's leaders today. I've been arrested because I'm a political opponent to the harm and the cruelty that they are pushing. That's why I host What Next. We are a different kind of daily news podcast. One story a day, five incredible voices a week. We see the news from the bottom up, not the top down. Daily news from a human being. Follow What Next now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.

• 1:00:42Liv Albert?

  Now, okay, the, this has really led me to another thing that has been kind of consuming my mind lately. And that is like, I forget how I came to this, but, but earlier in the year, I kind of revisited Hesiod's Theogony as, as a kind of like, what's the word I want? Like a ripple effect of the

• 1:01:10Liv Albert?

  But the matriarchy that would have existed prehistoric, in the prehistoric periods, you know, like the linking to the goddess figurines, all of that, like we're, I think, I mean, I never know quite how, what the consensus is, but I certainly say with certainty that it was a matriarchy before it was a patriarchy and that, you know, a lot of times you can see the, the kind of echo of that. And to me, these days, I read, I read the Theogony as that echo, as this like slow decline of the power of women until they are sufficiently subjugated by the current male power, right? Like you see the generational decline and how then Zeus like supersedes everyone. And, and I mean, just all of this

• 1:01:54Liv Albert?

  just connects with that to me. Like just this, this way that they just kept enforcing this idea that men were more of everything. And, you know, and they're just trying to like stamp out what was left of, of women holding any kind of power.

• 1:02:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's certainly that feeling by the time you get to the Olympian gods, you know, you've got women very much in her place.

• 1:02:20Liv Albert?

  Hera, right? Yeah. She is, she is the woman who has been put in her place. And even, you know, we talked about Callisto and the, the way that Zeus is assault of everyone, Apollo's assault of everyone, Poseidon, like the way that in all of the stories, it's, you know, it's just cut and dry. Like, oh, that, that this just happened. Like, we don't look at how the woman felt at all, particularly in the Theogony, you know? It's my kind of pet obsession that people love to say that Ovid invented the part of Medusa's story where Poseidon raped her. But I, I maintain it's in the Theogony because he says very explicitly, you know, that, that Medusa lay with Poseidon. And

• 1:03:03Liv Albert?

  the way it's described is violent. It's followed immediately by her death. Like all of these different things to me screams like, no, that was assault. And, and I've had a lot of men be like, well, no, but it doesn't say it's assault. And I'm like, Hesia didn't say anything was assault. That's because Hesia didn't conceptualize women as consenting or not consenting.

• 1:03:19Speaker 06

  Of course, it wasn't an issue. It wasn't a question. I think that's right. And, and I think, again, back to the Olympian ones, I mean, at that point, you know, you've got women very much in roles as, as wife or wife and mother, or as virgin. You've got, you know, you've got Hestia, you've got Artemis. You've got Athena as the virgin goddesses. And of course, you've got Athena, for goodness sake, born of the male.

• 1:03:41Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. She's like that exact example, right? Of yeah, he takes back that power. Oh, that's actually, thank you for bringing that up because the whole episode I did was really about, also about Parthenogenesis. And so and then how the Theogony connects with that. Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 06

  Yes, absolutely. And the thought of, you know, Athena, who who is born of the man and who is, the great defender of Athens, obviously, because she's not going to hang out with any men gods from any other city. She's, you know, she's pure.

• 1:04:12Liv Albert?

  And she's gonna stay there. She helps all the heroes. And she is, she's the man's goddess, the original agent of the patriarchy.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  I think that's right. She's she's indeed the man's goddess. So that's why Artemis is more interesting to me because, you know, you can see there's a woman's dimension there. In her virginity is not in the service of men in the same way. So, you know, Hestia, she's like eternal daughter, isn't she? She's just, minding the fire and doing what she's told at home. And Athena is out there battling things and generally being, being very male. But Artemis, she's she's in a different league. She's out there with the wild. And she's also hanging out with women. And yes, you know, she's,

• 1:04:58Speaker 06

  she's vicious, but in an interesting way. I mean, look, Actaeon sees her bathing, gets turned into a stag, gets hunted. I mean, what's not to like?

• 1:05:08Liv Albert?

  Truly, it's a, that's a great one.

• 1:05:11Speaker 06

  It's excellent. And then, of course, there's Pandora, if we're talking Theogony.

• 1:05:14Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, please.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  How long have we got on Pandora? So I'm very big on the idea that Pandora's jar is a womb.

• 1:05:24Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 06

  Okay, so she she's sent along with this jar, because obviously, it's not a box in the original thing. But isn't it interesting it becomes a box when of course, that's also slang for female genitalia?

• 1:05:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  Nice. So she's, she starts as a jar as a womb. She ends up as a box, vulva. I don't know. Maybe not see that one too far, but it's it's fun to try.

• 1:05:45Liv Albert?

  It is.

• 1:05:45Speaker 06

  So the jar, the jar which contains all evils, so that. Period pains from anyone, you know, wandering stuff, weird vibes and strange fumes coming out of it, but it contains hope. So that again is the womb that will produce the next generation. So she sits around all day, taking things into her belly. I wish is what he sees women as doing. They absorb everything a man can produce, whether that's agricultural products or men's semen. They just take it all in.

• 1:06:21Liv Albert?

  His view on women was.

• 1:06:24Speaker 06

  And then, and then, yeah, she takes it all in into her womb and her womb is the origin of everything.

• 1:06:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 06

  She's the origin of the race of women and everything else. Besides, Pandora is a particularly wonderful human being.

• 1:06:39Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:40Speaker 06

  I think, and there's so many great images of her jar across time. So Paul Clay did one where it's very much got sort of smoky sooty stuff happening in it, you know, it's like fire. So I think I have also there about the womb as warm, but it's the hot place. It's the place in Herodotus, you know, we have Periander putting his loaves into a cold oven as shorthand for having sex with his dead wife. So, I know, it's great, isn't it? He put his loaves, nudge, nudge into a cold oven, nudge, nudge. Know what I mean? That's what tyrants do.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  Amazing story. So a cold oven, of course, you know, because the womb is, is an oven, the womb cooks. The womb's a hot place. Women are colder than men, but the womb is a hot place. And women can cook, cook their blood in there into a baby. But then that whole thing about heat and cold is so big in the history of Western medicine. So it's not just about cooking your blood to make a baby, but the idea that breast milk is another form of menstrual blood that cooked even more.

• 1:07:56Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  And the air. And so that's why milk and blood are the same fluid through most of western medicine. But then, of course, if you can cook your blood a little bit more, you might make the best fluid of all, which is, of course, semen. Wow. So then that is a useful way that's used in history to explain why some men produce breast milk. So we would say it's a, it's a particular type of tumor that's producing milk, and it's not a normal thing. But you could argue in the past, when you didn't know about those tumors, that men had, could somehow cook their blood to make semen, but not quite cook it enough. So it becomes breast milk instead. So they're not proper men.

• 1:08:39Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:08:40Speaker 06

  I know. I, in my book, I actually have a guy from the 18th century who produced breast milk and used to squirt it at people at parties.

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

  You can't make this up, really. And this is, this is an 18th century, sort of quite reputable story.

• 1:08:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:09:01Liv Albert?

  Pandora, the, do you know, is it the original word pitos? Like, was it meant to be?

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  Yes, it's a pitos. Yeah, it's a pitos. So it's a storage jar. It's what you put your grain in over the winter.

• 1:09:10Liv Albert?

  Big, right?

• 1:09:11Speaker 06

  Big, it's big. It's a big jar.

• 1:09:13Liv Albert?

  I remember I read in, in Natalie Haynes's Pandora's Jar, like, her, her, her note about it being a pitos and, and the kind of reminder of, of just how un-sturdy, like, how unsteady a pitos is. You can easily knock it over.

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Pointed bottom, yeah.

• 1:09:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It, it's not meant to be something, you know, or, or rather, like, it is one of the easiest things to break, you know, it, because my, my theory on it mythologically is, because people love to, you know, ask about Pandora and then connect with all these evils and, you know, I mean. The first thing that drives me crazy is that people still say, you know, that it was like curiosity that made her do it because no, there's zero reference to that at all. There's zero like agency involved in her doing it. And that is, the idea of curiosity is entirely tied to the Christian Eve and like all of that grossness. And so instead, yeah, it's like it's Zeus set her up for failure is kind of the way the story goes. He set it up to happen exactly as it did. There was never going to be an alternative.

• 1:10:15Liv Albert?

  And I think that makes it so much more interesting and also so much more sort of like tied to the the purpose of that story, like the whole of the Theogony being this like slow subjugation of women, you know, in the Olympian or into in the gods, you get to Hera, who does, you know, only punishes the women for her husbands indiscretions and all these different things. And then for the mortals, you get Pandora, who was always destined to be quote unquote evil. And of course, I mean, taking any of that from Hesiod is hilarious in so many ways because I mean, he's not quite as evil to women, not quite as misogynistic in the Theogony, but it works in days.

• 1:10:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:50Liv Albert?

  Marrying a woman is the worst thing you could ever do.

• 1:10:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then if you don't marry one, that's bad too.

• 1:10:57Liv Albert?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  Really bad situation, right? Life is just bad.

• 1:11:01Liv Albert?

  He's just, yeah, the idea that he's contributed, you know, to the understanding of women in mythology is heartbreaking to me sometimes, but.

• 1:11:10Speaker 06

  But then you also, you mentioned Eve and the curiosity there. So listen, some really nice stories of Eve in later periods, so 16th, 17th, 18th century, where you've got people saying, actually, Eve is like a model of what a woman should be like. She's got natural curiosity. That's good. She's scientific. She's, yeah, she's great. She's really good. Eve wanted to find out what was going on. So she thought, oh, try the apple because I want knowledge. Who wouldn't want knowledge?

• 1:11:37Liv Albert?

  Well, that's the thing is that's how I certainly would see it. It's only the connotation that like she's conniving. And well, and actually just even saying that reminded me that when Hesiod writes the creation of Pandora, he's like, you know, all these different people gave her all these like really awful tendencies, but that's what it feels like to me. But yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  Mind of a bitch.

• 1:11:55Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:11:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. The ravenous gastare and the mind of a bitch. Yeah, when I've ever taught that, I say to, they say to students, the mind of a bitch. And that means the same thing as it does now.

• 1:12:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

  But then bitches, you know, we're on to dogs, we're into puppy, puppy dog fumigations in ancient Greek medicine. Where you stuff your puppy with herbs and spices and put it into a warm jar and then put the jar in a hole in the ground, which you've put a bit of sort of wood around and set fire to it. So it's a bit warm. And then you pass the fumes from the jar, including the fumes from the stuffed puppy into the woman's vagina. Because of course, that's really good for you.

• 1:12:37Speaker 06

  Just so I mention that. You need to do more Greek medicine. You'd love it.

• 1:12:42Liv Albert?

  No, that's horrifying. Oh, my God.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  Puppy dog fumigations, beetle pessaries, it's all there.

• 1:12:49Liv Albert?

  Well, anything that doesn't have dogs, what, what's the beetle?

• 1:12:53Speaker 06

  Oh, the beetle pessary, you, you take a cantharid beetle. So that's the same beetle used in Spanish fly. So very irritant. Spanish fly is an aphrodisiac because it sort of makes you all itchy and you want to do something. But in this case, you take your Spanish fly beetle and you take off the head, the feet and the wings. And you wrap the whole thing in wool, then you insert. And that's really quite good because, sorry, when I say quite good, I mean, it's obviously, that's a relative statement. It's quite good in a bad way, because the head, the feet and the wings are actually the most poisonous, irritant parts.

• 1:13:26Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:13:27Speaker 06

  So you are removing the worst bits. But then the whole point is you're supposed to be bringing on a delayed menstrual period. It's those periods that get stuck somewhere again. So the aim is to make the woman bleed.

• 1:13:37Liv Albert?

  The poor menopausal women.

• 1:13:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, they've got no chance. Well, they might not have lasted that long, of course.

• 1:13:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. So anyway, beetle pessaries, there you go.

• 1:13:46Liv Albert?

  Sure. Okay. I somehow that made me think of, I would love to hear anything you have to know about the like birth control.

• 1:13:57Speaker 06

  Oh gosh, birth control.

• 1:13:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Speaker 06

  You still get people saying sylphium.

• 1:14:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  Was, was, you know, the perfect birth control and we ended up growing it and using it and it became extinct. Ah, who knows? Who knows? In terms of what we do know, well, you've got all sorts of things in ancient medical texts, which sound like they could be used for birth control.

• 1:14:21Speaker 06

  But then that depends on what you mean by birth control. If you mean early abortion.

• 1:14:25Liv Albert?

  I mean, I mean, either.

• 1:14:26Speaker 06

  As a form of birth control. Yeah, well, exactly. So I think early abortion is a much more likely thing than contraception.

• 1:14:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  Because contraceptives, you know, there really isn't anything. And the sorts of things we we hear about, you've no idea what they're actually talking about. You know, is that, what is that plant? No idea.

• 1:14:42Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  Um, but early abortion, yes. So things like pennyroyal, which are abortive, would be used.

• 1:14:49Liv Albert?

  What is that?

• 1:14:50Speaker 06

  Plus, you do have discussions of what not to do if you want to make sure you keep the baby. So like, don't carry heavy weights, don't jump up and down. So you could do a lot of carrying heavy weights and jumping up and down if you don't want to keep the baby.

• 1:15:03Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:15:04Speaker 06

  It's interesting when ancient medicine could be used for the reverse effect of what you'd intended to use it for. You know, so doctors say, don't do this if, and you go, oh, that's exactly what I want. I'll do that.

• 1:15:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  But then that raises questions about how far ancient medicine was known to women.

• 1:15:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 06

  So you've got one line that says, actually, all these things were women's remedies, and men just wrote them down.

• 1:15:26Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  And the other line saying, oh, come off it. Some of these things are just, you know, no woman in her right mind would do this. You know, these are things men have done in order to be unpleasant to women and to punish them. And then you've got.

• 1:15:39Liv Albert?

  I'm glad we have that alternative.

• 1:15:40Speaker 06

  Like, it's a nice one. I think I'm somewhere in the middle, like, you know, the the middle's often a good place to be, where you can say, okay, so actually, probably both sexes thought that's how the body worked. Because if you're a woman and the doctor says to you, what's happened is your womb has got stuck on your liver and you need to do this. You sort of need to believe that if you're going to do any of the things the doctor tells you to.

• 1:16:00Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  Otherwise, you'll go, yeah, that's lovely, and just not do it. I think it's a shared knowledge, but it's not a knowledge which is positive to women, which is why I'm always interested in finding those points where women could just subvert it a bit.

• 1:16:15Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:16Speaker 06

  So if you're being told, you know, do this, but don't do it in this way, otherwise this will happen. And you think, actually, that's what I want. You can subvert.

• 1:16:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  So, yes. Subverting, or or alternative, alternative interpretations, you know, like Artemis and menstruation, and actually, it's females, it's women's bodies offering their blood to the gods. And so your, your human sacrifice, in a good way, because you're still alive, between, you know, communicating between gods and men. If you want to see your menstrual blood in that way, it's a lot better than seeing it as a waste product, for example.

• 1:16:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, unfortunately, I know the answer is probably no, but do we know anything about like what women were doing themselves? Or like, do we have anything, you know, I'm thinking like Sappho, where it's like, oh, it's a kind of a freak nature that we have her, you know?

• 1:17:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is a freak. It's an amazing freak. It's wonderful.

• 1:17:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Speaker 06

  Of course, having it as something that's fragmentary then makes it so difficult to interpret as well. But it really isn't anything like that medically.

• 1:17:18Liv Albert?

  No, yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 06

  Um, not in this period. You know, later on, you do get women writing. So by the 12th century.

• 1:17:24Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:17:25Speaker 06

  You've got women writing medical texts and, and talking about remedies. Uh, so you can see what's going on there. But it's always within the sorts of tradition that they've already inherited. So it's very hard to say something medical without the underpinning of the tradition.

• 1:17:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 06

  The underpinning of the tradition may give you the authority to say, this is how the body works, and that's why I think this is a good remedy, rather than saying, yeah, I just believe everything the men are telling me.

• 1:17:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  So we know there were women who wrote medical treatises in the ancient world. We know there were women whose recipes are mentioned by men in the ancient world as, as good. But then I never know for sure how far men are just saying, oh, women told me this as a, as a, what I've called a trump card in the knowledge game. Like, so how do you know that? Oh, women told me.

• 1:18:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 06

  Oh, oh, in that case, you know?

• 1:18:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I spoke with, um, a, a friend slash scholar, um, a couple of years now, I think, um, Kristy Vogler about, uh, women and medica in, in ancient Rome specifically, but like women practicing anything resembling, you know, medicine, um, but how it was kind of seen as witchcraft.

• 1:18:45Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:18:45Liv Albert?

  And especially because, you know, I've, uh, Rome's version of witches as compared to Greek has always fascinated me because they're terrified of them. And Greeks were like, they're kind of cool. Um, so I'm just curious if, if we have anything kind of like that, you know, an example of what we could decide was women maybe doing something medical, but they thought, oh, she's practicing pharmacia or something wild, you know?

• 1:19:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. You see, what's interesting, when you, when you mentioned the Roman stuff, of course, because you then get into things like wives of emperors and. Uh, you know, using poisons and

• 1:19:15Liv Albert?

  Oh gosh, yeah.

• 1:19:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, poison is what women do and and not be able to trust a woman because she's given you this thing because it's probably going to kill you.

• 1:19:23Liv Albert?

  The Romans were also so nice to women.

• 1:19:24Speaker 06

  They so were, they so were. Um, but then, you know, you've got some great Roman stories, which I think need to be known better. So it's not original Roman story. It's a later tradition about the Emperor Nero. So Nero, of course, is the one who wanted his mother dissected so he could see the womb he came out of.

• 1:19:47Liv Albert?

  Oh, God, I don't think I knew that detail.

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  That's really just great, isn't it?

• 1:19:52Liv Albert?

  Ah.

• 1:19:53Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I want to see, I want to see my place of origin, which is fascinating, just a man not having something and wanting to see it. But when he talks about that, um, in a later tradition about him, he actually decides he wants to get pregnant. So he gets the doctors to give him, um, a tadpole, which he swallows. I know.

• 1:20:18Liv Albert?

  Some of those, sometimes I do think of the video for this podcast would be good. I don't.

• 1:20:23Speaker 06

  I think that would be a fantastic image.

• 1:20:25Liv Albert?

  My expression.

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then eventually he has to sort of vomit up his frog baby. And you can imagine the doctors thinking, what the hell are we going to do? You know, we get a frog somewhere, hide it under the bed, you know, pretend he threw it up. I don't know, whatever. He's the emperor. Do whatever, you know? He'll kill you if you don't. Just do it. I find that absolutely fascinating. Nero and his frog baby.

• 1:20:50Liv Albert?

  I knew this episode would be interesting. I didn't realize it would be so funny.

• 1:20:54Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, I know, I know, Nero and the frog baby. But then this whole thing about wanting to know about the womb you came out of.

• 1:21:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  Very interesting.

• 1:21:05Liv Albert?

  It feels like mommy issues right there.

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of issues.

• 1:21:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Speaker 06

  But then again, obviously you tell stories like this about tyrants and bad people. Don't you like Periander and his loaves in a cold oven? You, you know, this is how tyrants behave.

• 1:21:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 06

  There's sort of a bit of a womb thing going on there.

• 1:21:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, that's, that is very interesting.

• 1:21:27Liv Albert?

  I mean, I, this is all utterly, utterly fascinating. What, like, is there something? I mean, I feel like you probably would have told me already, but I just want to know of anything else utterly wild that you learned.

• 1:21:40Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay. You were ready. I'm excited.

• 1:21:42Speaker 06

  I'm so wild. I'm so ready with wild. So Cleopatra.

• 1:21:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, well, I'm excited.

• 1:21:48Speaker 06

  I like Cleopatra. So Cleopatra, there's a letter allegedly written by Mark Antony about Cleopatra to the doctor Saranus. Now, Saranus is 2nd century AD, so this is never going to work historically, but hey, you know, who cares? And so this is a letter.

• 1:22:07Liv Albert?

  Let's do 100 years.

• 1:22:08Speaker 06

  It's not bad. It's a letter, I think it's 16th century, by someone who just decided to make up some fake letters from famous people in the ancient world, which is a great thing to do, obviously, and a great task to set your students to do. So this one.

• 1:22:20Liv Albert?

  Incredibly helpful to a future historian.

• 1:22:22Speaker 06

  It's great. So this is a letter in which Mark Antony writes to say that he's got a real problem with Cleopatra because she's just sexually insatiable. And he can't cope. And she's out every night having sex with the entire population of Rome because, you know, she just can't, she just can't get enough of it.

• 1:22:41Liv Albert?

  Well, sure.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  So Dr. Saranus says, okay, I think what's wrong with her, it's her rigid organs. So it's again, one of these clitorises that becomes a penis.

• 1:22:50Liv Albert?

  Right. Well, Cleopatra of all people would be at too close to a man.

• 1:22:54Speaker 06

  It's great, isn't it? It's great. So she's got this, yeah, she's got this enlarged clitoris. And so what Saranus says is, here's some ointment. You, Mark Antony, put it on your penis and have sex with her. And she will then stop wanting other men because it'll make you absolutely amazing. So Mark Antony does that and it's, she's, it's great. She's cured of her desire to have sex with other men. There you go. I thought a Cleopatra story would be something you'd quite like.

• 1:23:24Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean, of course.

• 1:23:26Speaker 06

  So you could say, yeah, the ancient world is pretty wild anyway. Once you get people talking about the ancient world and, you know, from the Middle Ages onwards, they, they make up even more weird stories and they use the ancient world here to say, well, actually, the cure for a woman who is promiscuous is having sex with a man is really good.

• 1:23:48Liv Albert?

  Well, of cour- I mean, that's

• 1:23:49Speaker 06

  Comforting, isn't it?

• 1:23:50Liv Albert?

  Natural, of course.

• 1:23:51Speaker 06

  It's comforting.

• 1:23:52Liv Albert?

  That's the solution. And of course, it, all it would take was just a bit of ointment to make him the best she'd ever had.

• 1:23:57Speaker 06

  Absolutely, absolutely. It's not about technique. It's not what you do with it. It's the ointment.

• 1:24:02Liv Albert?

  Well, it's not about the man at all, ever.

• 1:24:06Speaker 06

  No, no, no.

• 1:24:07Liv Albert?

  It's always about, maybe her clitoris is broken, well, if it's too big as it is. Oh.

• 1:24:14Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:24:14Speaker 06

  You did ask.

• 1:24:15Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm, no, I'm thrilled that I asked. I, I just, I,

• 1:24:22Liv Albert?

  I mean, what little I've read for just this, like, silly little research I'm doing for a novel, blew my mind. And so I just, I mean, what else, what else do we know about the way they thought about, like, women's sex organs? Do we know much more? Like, their whole clitoris thing is obviously, you're saying, you know, very confusing. And they're like, what is it, what is it not? But did, did they have any other wild theories about the vagina broadly?

• 1:24:50Speaker 06

  Well, I suppose, yeah, it's not, it's not specifically Greek and Roman. The vagina, dentata, the toothed vagina is, is the classic, really, isn't it?

• 1:24:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 06

  In terms of, of the fear of the vagina.

• 1:25:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  But I, this is making me think of the stories of, um, the women who raise up their clothes to show the men their lower organs.

• 1:25:10Liv Albert?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:25:11Speaker 06

  Persian women or Spartan women, depending on which version you read. And the men are fleeing from battle. And the women lift up their skirts and they say, what are you doing running away, you cowards? Do you want to come back in here where you came out from? And the men go, oh, no, we don't. And run back and fight bravely. And I find that a fascinating story because what are the women showing? You know, you can't actually show your womb. You can't show

• 1:25:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 06

  your vagina. You can show your belly and thus hint that that's what, that's what you came out of.

• 1:25:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43Speaker 06

  So is it the womb they're showing there? But also the whole crawling back inside thing is just fabulous, the sort of one-way travel.

• 1:25:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, it also feels like a really early form of just calling a man a pussy.

• 1:25:55Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:25:57Liv Albert?

  Like, I normally don't like that term because it feels derogatory to women, but in that case, like, that's, I mean, that's what it is.

• 1:26:04Speaker 06

  It has bad Donald Trump moments, doesn't it?

• 1:26:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 06

  As a term, but yeah, absolutely. And it's sort of saying you're emasculated, you don't have, you don't have the bits, you need the bits to fight.

• 1:26:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 06

  But of course, you don't need the bits to fight, but then you've got that whole terminology thing in Latin of vagina, meaning sheath, as in the thing you put your sword in.

• 1:26:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  So, yeah, there's something going on there that's, that's worth looking at.

• 1:26:30Liv Albert?

  Okay, so the way you said about women not having, you know, the skill or whatever it was, sorry, my, my brain is bumping around because you're telling me so many fun things, but what do you know about the whole myth that like the Amazons cut off their boob?

• 1:26:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, Amazons, yeah, very interesting. So in representations on vase painting, they have both of them.

• 1:26:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Speaker 06

  So what's going on with Herodotus and others talking about they've only got one? So the only one thing, obviously the little theory there is that the strength of your breast will go into your arm instead.

• 1:27:03Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:27:05Speaker 06

  So that's going to make you stronger because you've only got one breast. I think it's better as a theory than the one that says that you're pulling a bow and it's easier if you haven't got a breast on that side.

• 1:27:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Speaker 06

  But then the problem you get, and this again is one where classical myth, as told in the 16th century, has a bit of a moment. So there's a real question in the 16th century, could Amazons breastfeed?

• 1:27:28Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:27:30Speaker 06

  And so the answer is, well, yes, they have one breast left in order to breastfeed because that's obviously what women do.

• 1:27:36Liv Albert?

  Of course.

• 1:27:36Speaker 06

  So then the question is, do Amazons menstruate? Because if menstruation is all about blood building up and Amazons are rushing around the place, killing people, using up their excess blood in energy. So have they got any menstruation left? But they need menstrual blood to be transformed into breast milk, otherwise they can't feed their young. So you need to have some menstruation to make breast milk.

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  But you wouldn't be having much menstruation because you're rushing around all the time. So, and this is a genuine question that 16th century medics wrote about, and they couldn't come to a conclusion because it's obviously an impossible question to answer.

• 1:28:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Speaker 06

  But you can see why it becomes a question. Once you're thinking about milk and blood being the same thing.

• 1:28:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, it's interesting to me too, because, I mean, my, my brain kind of goes to, you know, the idea that women, that, you know, mythologically would be Amazons, you know, would be so muscular and everything that, you know, in many cases, I think they, they would have smaller breasts for that reason. But then like, yeah, where, where does it come in that they only have one? Like, that's odd. You know, I understand the like, the general masculinity that comes with a, a woman who is a warrior to that degree. But yeah, the, the one just feels so odd.

• 1:28:59Speaker 06

  Yes, it does, doesn't it? It's just so strange when art doesn't, doesn't do that. So there must be something going on here about, about force and energy.

• 1:29:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and they were so afraid of women like the Amazons, right? Where women who didn't need men, women who could fight, women who could stand up for themselves, like.

• 1:29:20Speaker 06

  I, I love the, I love the different myths of how the Amazons get pregnant as to whether they have a sort of big sex festival every year with a neighboring tribe. Yeah. There's that, that theory. And then if these boys are born, they give them back to the neighboring tribe and they keep the girls, which is sort of reasonable. And the other theory is that they're, they do have a lot of fun with their, their men, but they keep the men lame, so they can't run away.

• 1:29:45Speaker 06

  And the lameness, again, it's, it's the sort of laming your men. Is that saying something about the energy of the men? Again, not going to their legs, but going to their penises. So does it make them better?

• 1:29:55Liv Albert?

  Of course.

• 1:29:56Speaker 06

  So are the Amazons actually having a great time?

• 1:29:59Liv Albert?

  To me, yeah, to me, that feels like, uh, more of the same, like, you know, the, the reasons we have these stories and how that influenced the stories. Cause you know, like, laming a man because, you know, who, who's sleeping with an Amazon feels like, oh, that guy is not a real man because he's sexually attracted to this woman who, you know, is such a badass warrior.

• 1:30:27Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:30:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh.

• 1:30:30Speaker 06

  I don't know. It's, it's, yeah, it's mind blowing, isn't it?

• 1:30:33Liv Albert?

  It is. I'm just.

• 1:30:35Speaker 06

  Amazon's are fun.

• 1:30:36Liv Albert?

  They, I mean, they are. Oh, my God. I wish there was like, an actual surviving myth, myth, like, pre, you know, I think it's just in pseudo Apollodorus, like.

• 1:30:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, but, you know, even just the, the idea, though, that they were so popularly depicted, even without a surviving myth, is, is so much fun.

• 1:30:55Speaker 06

  But they, they became quite fascinating, too, in, again, in later history, the idea of an Amazon, because you get to see the breast.

• 1:31:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 06

  Even though you only see one of them.

• 1:31:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 06

  So, I, I found examples of, for example, musical performances, where people do various tableaus, so people just stand there, because you obviously can't move around, because it might look a bit dodgy. But you stand there and represent a scene from history.

• 1:31:23Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  And the Amazons were very popular from that point of view, presumably because they're Amazons, so by definition, you can see a breast.

• 1:31:30Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:31Speaker 06

  So if your audience is, you know, a load of blokes desperate to see a breast, oh, you can do it there.

• 1:31:36Liv Albert?

  Just one?

• 1:31:37Speaker 06

  Whoa, fantastic. It's all right. It's the Amazons. Doesn't count. It's not really a breast. It's history.

• 1:31:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 06

  Classical. It's respectable.

• 1:31:45Liv Albert?

  Uh, I mean, in that case, there's an awful lot of statues you can go looking at, guys.

• 1:31:49Speaker 06

  There are. There are. This is, again, good reason to keep showing them. And of course, Adam and Eve. Eve's a great one, because they haven't got any clothes on, have they?

• 1:31:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 06

  The more representations of Adam and Eve you have, the more you can see bodies, can't you?

• 1:32:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:00Speaker 06

  Which apparently is fascinating.

• 1:32:02Liv Albert?

  I mean.

• 1:32:04Liv Albert?

  This is how that's, it's all. I could go on forever, uh, but I do, I try not to keep people too much longer than an hour and a half, so, God.

• 1:32:11Speaker 06

  I think we're there.

• 1:32:13Liv Albert?

  Oh, sorry?

• 1:32:13Speaker 06

  I think we're there.

• 1:32:14Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, I know, exactly.

• 1:32:16Speaker 06

  Time flies when you're having fun.

• 1:32:17Liv Albert?

  It does. I mean, I say this every time, and every time it's true. I love these conversation episodes so much. Like, it's just so interesting. I, I'm absolutely fascinated. I also recently spoke, um, with my friend Alexandra Sills, who, who researches, um, ancient sports and games and everything, and so, actually, oh, I feel like she graduated from the Open University. Anyway.

• 1:32:42Speaker 06

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:32:42Liv Albert?

  Um, but anyway, she came on the show to, uh, to talk to me about, about the Olympics, and so I'm just thinking, like, oh, we're doing so many naked episodes.

• 1:32:53Liv Albert?

  But this one's far more interesting, because that was, women weren't allowed because of, you know, all of the naked part, so.

• 1:32:58Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:59Liv Albert?

  Oh my gosh, this is utterly incredible. Is there anything, well, you know, maybe tell my listeners a bit more about the book, like not, you know, go into detail, but where they can buy it, whatever, you know?

• 1:33:10Speaker 06

  So the books, the books coming out, Immaculate Forms, uncovering the history of female bodies, well, something like that. I kept forgetting my own titles. Anyway.

• 1:33:19Liv Albert?

  I'll put it somewhere.

• 1:33:20Speaker 06

  Immaculate Forms. So it's coming out in the UK on September the 5th, and it's coming out in the US and Canada with Basic Books in January.

• 1:33:29Liv Albert?

  Nice.

• 1:33:30Speaker 06

  With a slightly different subtitle. So in the US and Canada, it's going to be the body in four parts because it's breast, clitoris, hymen, womb. So that's fun. And yeah, there are various podcasts around it, like this one, hurrah. And I just had enormous fun writing it. The difference between the UK and the US, Canada version is the US, Canada version doesn't have the color plates.

• 1:34:00Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:34:00Speaker 06

  But it will, on the other hand, be cheaper. So that's all good. Depends whether you want the color plates or not. I'm a bit of a sucker for colored pictures myself, but

• 1:34:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:09Speaker 06

  you can imagine them. You can imagine them.

• 1:34:12Liv Albert?

  I'm just thrilled that you're saying Canada, not just the US, because most authors I talk to just, just assume. And I'm like, you know, we exist too. And sometimes we get the UK versions of things. I used to work for Penguin, so it was a lot of little both, you know? Anyway, I'm defensive about not being American.

• 1:34:28Speaker 06

  There's also going to be a Polish edition and a Turkish edition.

• 1:34:31Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's so fun.

• 1:34:33Speaker 06

  It's cool, isn't it?

• 1:34:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's great. I mean, I'm so thrilled. I hope my listeners will all go by it whenever they can in their respective countries. I certainly want a copy. It is, this has been so much fun. Like I said, I knew this was gonna be really interesting. I didn't know I was gonna laugh so much. This is, you've been such a joy. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  Thank you for inviting me. It's great. It's been a really fun conversation.

• 1:35:28Liv Albert?

  Conversations: The Intersection of Magic and Medicine: Women as Medicah in the Ancient World with Dr. Kristy Vogler.

• 1:35:52Liv Albert?

  So generally speaking, I am a, I call myself, an ancient Mediterranean archaeologist, particularly interested in gender. And my dissertation eventually started getting me to look at the role that women had in ancient medicine. Which is so cool. Random things we found, and I sent you some pictures at Ganja Vecchio where we're finding things like sex scenes on lamps. And then the one that I obsess about in my dissertation, and I've done a lot of work on, is a scene of a woman lowering herself on what, we initially pulled it out of the ground, and was like, "Well, that's a painful dildo situation right

• 1:36:31Liv Albert?

  there." And like, that just kind of shows how androcentric a lot of archaeology can be sometimes, that like, even as a woman in the field, I automatically read this as another sex scene. And it took another friend of mine to look at the image. Wow, I'm gonna go so off track. Yeah, I love it. And it took another woman to be like, "Well, maybe that's, it is painful, but maybe because it's childbirth." And it never occurred to us, because you don't see a lot of images, or at least, I'm starting to think, a lot more images of real childbirth existed in the ancient world. But for a long time, they weren't being identified. And published. So Wow.

• 1:37:13Liv Albert?

  That paired with these objects that also there's hairpins that women would wear and one is like a carved hand holding a pomegranate, which is an allusion to Persephone, as well as that tiny little Venus figurine that I absolutely love that piece. There's all of these images that women would use on what we call mundus melibri, objects they decorate themselves with that related to female fertility in particular. And then we found medical tools in this like same area. And they're specialized medical tools, so they would have been used for bone surgery and things like that.

• 1:37:54Liv Albert?

  So the combination of this huge emphasis on female sexuality with practical tools of healing made me want to investigate the idea of there's a woman practicing medicine here, which we know exists. We see records of it in epigraphy and like this poem I'll read later, that Alcainius writes about his aunt, that women did practice medicine, but like most of the time, if you see medical tools, we're so conditioned to identify that as relating to a male profession. So that was my research at Ganja Vecchio. That's how I kind of really got into this focus. I'm currently an assistant professor. I always mix up assistant and associate.

• 1:38:39Liv Albert?

  I'm an assistant professor at University of Lynchburg with the History Department. And I am also a podcaster, like you mentioned. I joined two colleagues for Movies We Dig, where we love looking at modern reception of the ancient world in movies, film. We're doing video games and we just did our first musical Hadestown last week. So it's, it's been really fun to geek out in that format. And yeah, that's kind of where I am right now and what I've been doing. That's super fun. Absolutely want to hear about women practicing medicine. Yeah. So as I was working on the childbirth scene on the lamp,

• 1:39:23Liv Albert?

  I randomly came across the Wal fresco from Pompeii. And I sent you a picture of that one as well, of this beautiful scene from the Aeneid, where Aeneas has been injured.

• 1:39:37Liv Albert?

  And there is a surgeon and he's named Iapix and he is trying to pull the arrowhead out of the thigh of Aeneas. And in the background, you see his mother Aphrodite hovering in the background. She's actually holding Dittany in her hand because she is going to swoop in and actually be the one to cure her son because the surgery is failing. And, you know, I was, for my dissertation, I was really trying to imagine if there is a female medical practitioner in this space, what does her interactions with her patients look like? Like, what is her relationship with them?

• 1:40:16Liv Albert?

  And this was the first image I'd really seen that wasn't necessarily talking about women as a medical practitioner, but just women taking care of their children. And it was a, it was a role I, of Aphrodite that I'd never even thought about before because so rarely are the goddesses, other than maybe Demeter and Persephone, really shown caring for their children. So I found that and then I went to the Aeneid. I sadly had not read the Aeneid. I still need to read. Sadly. I mean. It's fine. I probably should, but, but I went to the passage in book 12 and I will not read

• 1:40:57Liv Albert?

  it as nicely as you do, but it just opened my eyes even more to this idea of the two types of healing that existed in the world at the time that Virgil was writing. So it says, "But the son of Isis, Iapix, came. Apollo had loved him painfully but beyond all others and gladly offered all his skills and powers, his lyre and prophecy and his swift arrows. But to prolong his dying father's life, he chose to learn the properties of herbs and humble, unheroic arts of healing. Aeneas seethed in pain, propped on his huge spear among the warrior crowd with grieving Iolus, but their tears didn't move him. Old Iapix, his robe hitched up in the physician's manor, and you can actually see how his robes

• 1:41:42Liv Albert?

  are hitched up in the fresco as well. So cool. ... made many anxious trials with herbs of phobos, applied

• 1:41:50Liv Albert?

  With no result, and when he prodded the point or took it in his gripping force ups, no route proved lucky and his patron god didn't come help. Across the plain, cruel horror swelled and disaster neared. Dust filled the sky, horsemen came swooping in and swarms of arrows reached the camp's heart. Grim shouts went heavenward as young men fought and died in ruthless battle. Venus, the mother, shaken by her child's pain, unfair, picked Denny in Cretan Ida. This is an herb with trailing purple flowers and downy leaves, familiar to wild goats for browsing when they're wounded by an arrow. Venus veiled in a dark cloud, brought it down and steeped the secret remedy in water.

• 1:42:35Liv Albert?

  A bright bowl held, she sprinkled in ambrosia and panacea and its pleasant fragrance. The moment old Iapix bathed the wound, the pain was gone, though he did not know why. The blood dried from the bottom of the lesion, the arrow yielded in his hand unforced, it dropped out and the body's weakness vanished. Iapix took the lead, go to the others. Why are you standing there? Quick, get his weapons. It was no human power, no skill of mind that saved your life, Aeneas. Someone greater than me is sending you to greater exploits. Oh, that's so cool. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I love how explicit it is too, that it's like,

• 1:43:15Liv Albert?

  this surgeon is calling on Apollo as he would because, you know, he's the god of medicine and, but Apollo's not there. He's like, no, Apollo's not helping. Like, it is Venus. Yes. Like, there's, there's some really interesting things to unpack there about Iapix as a healer too, like, he, Apollo has offered him, you know, to be a great warrior, to have prophecy, or to have musical skills. And he's like, no, I care about my father and I want to take care of him. So those are the skills I want. And Virgil's coming out and saying it's unheroic what he chose. So there's, there is, interestingly enough, the Romans kind of have a resistance against medicine because it's seen as foreign. It came from the Greeks.

• 1:44:01Liv Albert?

  So there, it's very interesting that that skill set is kind of skewed as, ah, it's not as good as other things. You could have gotten from the God. And even so, he acknowledges like, hey, my skill isn't what saved Aeneas. It's some other unknown power that did it. And for me, it's Venus's love and care for her own child and her knowledge of pharmacia. That is what ultimately saves him. And to me, that was just such a great illustration of, you know, what scholars in medical anthropology say, medical pluralism, where you have surgery, you have biomedicine, this kind of rational science, and then you have

• 1:44:45Liv Albert?

  this more natural form of healing, often associated with women and often associated with magic. I'll unpack a lot of it, but basically, this gendered idea of health becomes more and more pronounced. It's not really there with the Greeks, but the Romans are really starting to define medicine as masculine and rational, and the kind of healing that women practice is quickly being skewed as magical and therefore dangerous. Wow. Yeah. That stuff happens so early. Like, what? That's amazing to me that it does. I mean, I just can't, you know, you think of witchcraft immediately. And I'm just shocked that

• 1:45:28Liv Albert?

  that that was so early, even in, I suppose, just pre-Christianity. I don't totally know what I'm saying here. But I would have just assumed that that came with Christianity, not for any like tangible reason that I could name. Yeah, that was my assumption too, that this kind of demonizing of homeopathic healing and medicine is something that would have come a little bit later. But it is interesting that we see in the second century BCE, there's kind of an anti-Hellenism movement that

• 1:46:00Liv Albert?

  Both Pliny and Cato kind of write about how they hate doctors and they think doctors are dangerous because they're just out to get your money and possibly kill you. And it's much better, it used to be actually the role of the pater familias, the, the man of the house to take care of the household in that regard. And so we do see during the Roman Republic, we'll see some medical tools in villas that would have been kind of like your first aid kit that the pater familias would have been in charge of. So as medicine is being introduced from the East, particularly from the Greeks, and that role of taking care of and healing your own household is kind of being given to

• 1:46:44Liv Albert?

  other people that you see as less than you, there was a big pushback from it, interestingly enough. At the same time, what I have really loved about studying medicine is that it's one of the few professions that women in the ancient world could do that still met gender norms, where the expectation of women are caring, they take care of the family, and they could actually make money off of it, to the point that they could be economically independent, which is also probably why women practicing medicine became more and more skewed as witchcraft and dangerous. Mm hmm. That's so interesting. I mean, and just like, I mean, the fascinating of women

• 1:47:28Liv Albert?

  getting a role like that and being allowed to do something like that, but then also the inherent like, well, I mean, they're allowed, but it's also still going to come with trouble because, because it's women doing things. Mm hmm. Yeah. And it, it goes back to this problem we still have today where work that is often gendered as female is less valued economically. So we see this even with the types of jobs that slave women would have, where it's mostly service jobs, doing hair. Like cleaning, I'm assuming, stuff like the household things. And most women couldn't earn money that way to even buy their freedom. It was pretty rare. Hmm.

• 1:48:11Liv Albert?

  But we do have instances and there's records of how the value of a slave goes up if they have medical training. And knowledge. And it wasn't just limited to males or females. So a woman could, in that regard, actually earn her freedom through an income. And we see, especially in the Western part of the Roman world at this point, that most female practitioners were of either slave status or former slave status, or they were the children of freedwomen, which is just really cool to see how eventually this skill that got someone out of slavery is being passed on to their children. Yeah, that's, that's incredible. And I don't even, I don't have full thoughts to think about it because I'm just taking it all.

• 1:48:57Liv Albert?

  It's all good. All I can think about, and we'll see how much this fits, but have you read The Wolf Den? No. From last year. It's a novel from last year by Elodie Harper, and it's about an enslaved woman in a brothel, brothel in Pompeii. And it's so good. Um, so just generally recommend it anyway, but it's now kind of my whole, because I don't spend a lot of time in Rome. It's kind of my whole, like, knowledge point, other than, like, Star's Spartacus series for Rome. So it's sort of like taking everything in it in that respect. Um, but yeah, that's, that's just fascinating. And the idea that, that it was, like, of course, I suppose it was harder for women to, to buy themselves out of slavery.

• 1:49:43Liv Albert?

  But then this thing that they could do that is, I mean, highly skilled, just generally speaking, let alone how they actually valued it as, as being highly skilled. That's, it's sort of refreshing and lovely to think that that kind of, at least some, one thing existed that they could train themselves in that could possibly get them out, or just a different kind of status. Yeah. And then, like, the question I became really interested that in, because this is a trade of sorts, is if you had, um, so for instance, at Pompeii, Ria Berg has done some research of a, a pair of medical tools found in one of the houses there. And she's identified one that actually has a person's name written on the tool, and it's Sporata.

• 1:50:28Liv Albert?

  And she makes an argument that this is a slave woman's name. And it starts to become the question of like, all right, if this is a slave woman, what is her relationship with the different patients she would have in the house? Like, what is her relationship with? The domina and the pater familias, like how does she balance care for them versus care for slaves, especially like if slaves are coming to her for pharmakia that would allow them to have an abortion because they don't want a child born into slavery? And how do you balance the expectations of both sides and navigate that? Yeah. Which to me is, is the most interesting questions you can ask about the lived realities

• 1:51:11Liv Albert?

  that these women had that never get commented upon in the literature we see a lot of the time. Yeah, I mean, I imagine nobody was writing that kind of thing down. And I, I think that's why I like, the other reason I like this moment in the Aeneid so much is, you know, there's a big debate about going to Greek and Roman literature, predominantly written by wealthy, literate men of the time, and like, how much can you actually learn about women's lives from their point of view? And I, you know, arguably, there's a lot here that it's, it's definitely a skewed view.

• 1:51:52Liv Albert?

  But like, that instance, like, all of a sudden, you think Virgil is thinking about his own mother taking care of him, or these stories passed on, if you go back to Homer, like, who survived the fall of Troy? It was mostly women who were enslaved, and they're the ones who desperately want to tell the stories of what happened. And so how do those little glimmers of what women experienced actually make into the literature itself? And trying to pick those out is really exciting for me, if I can find the physical evidence to go with it. Yeah, because I suppose physical, physical evidence would be like, all there is, because there is no, no written evidence. Yeah.

• 1:52:35Liv Albert?

  It's also so much less like subjective, I guess, too, right? I mean, I'm constantly on the podcast just questioning, you know, the motives and what they wrote down and why and what survives and why. And so, yeah, when you have these like actual, physical evidence, it's so much more clear about what is actually being. I mean, certainly not all the time, I'm sure, but like, in terms of the, the objective power of it, whether you can understand it is probably a different question. Yeah, and like I said, with the, the very first lamp fragment where like my automatic reading of it was very androcentric, because that's just how a lot of archaeology has been for a long time anyway. So eventually you just have to learn to ask the other questions of like, well, wait,

• 1:53:20Liv Albert?

  the physical stuff, obviously were used by women and women have a presence here. And like, we don't have to just go based off what the men were saying about them, like we can reimagine. And another really good example, I forget her, the name of the researcher, but she gave the example of looking at cosmetic tools. And if you find those in spaces, because men are so against women putting on makeup in the ancient world. Like you're supposed to, you know, have a natural beauty and it's never good to be augmenting it in any way. And even Ovid, who is trying to be a little bit more judicious, like, yeah, I love a beautiful face.

• 1:54:02Liv Albert?

  But then he says things like, but I don't want to see you put it on, like, you don't want to see it. And so what's really cool then is like, all right, I have found a space where I'm finding these cosmetic tools. And all of these men keep saying, we have nothing to do with that. Then I can imagine this as a space controlled by a woman. That's, that's really cool to think about. So sometimes the men give us more clues than we realize. And we just have to kind of think in reverse sometimes or like, okay, if you're saying you don't have anything to do with that, can I assume women do have something to do with it then? Yeah, that's so interesting. I, I had no idea that about that when it comes to makeup.

• 1:54:46Liv Albert?

  To me, it feels like they're angry about some kind of like trickery, which is so modern now too, right? Of like, it's, it's just like something that hasn't gone away or it's come back or what have you. But that doesn't sound unfamiliar. Not at all. And it's, it's kind of interesting because like there is an expectation. Of maintaining cultists, like maintaining a good appearance even for men. But it's, it's again supposed to look natural. And I always think of going to Sephora and how you have like, skincare section, and then you have the fun eyeshadow section. Yeah. Like even those are still separated from each other, an understanding of how you appear.

• 1:55:28Liv Albert?

  Well, that and like, you know, even today, how common it is to, okay, here's all the makeup you need for a quote unquote, natural look. And it's like a trillion different things, but it's supposed to make it look like you're not wearing any makeup at all. And I mean, you know, admittedly, I like, I put on makeup most days and it's makeup that's like barely anything. But it's like my, the thing I put on every day, even if it's not meant to, it's not crazy eyeshadow, it's not obvious, anything. And yet it's this totally like normal thing for me. It's, yeah. Yeah. Do we know anything about whether they did that? Like makeup that wasn't supposed to look like makeup? Um, I, in terms of, so I'm not as specialized in cosmetics in particular, but they're definitely,

• 1:56:14Liv Albert?

  and a lot of it's lead based, unfortunately. Oh, lovely. But trying, they're still trying to do natural things like make your cheeks rosy, putting a color on your lips. I know like Cole was known for the eye and things like that. What I do know, going back to like more objects is that along with cosmetics, women were not supposed to appear gaudy with all the jewelry and stuff. But what's interesting about jewelry is that was sometimes a woman's only disposable income. And so it was really important to have. So one way that women subvert this idea of like, you shouldn't be wearing gaudy jewelry,

• 1:56:54Liv Albert?

  is that they repurpose the jewelry to promote fertility because of course men want them to have legitimate children. So you get the hand holding the palm of granite as a hairpin. You get armbands.

• 1:57:08Liv Albert?

  Of snakes, which are also believed to promote fertility and things like that, made of gold that women wear. So they're like, okay, you say I can't have jewelry, but as long as like it's helping me have children, you're okay with it. And that's kind of how they subvert these ideas and they still get to have a disposable income and dress up the way they want to, which I think is so cool. Yeah, it's such a clearly intentional, it's, I mean, it's just sort of a brilliant way of getting around that kind of social expectation. Also, I really want a hairpin of a hand holding a pomegranate, like that sounds gorgeous. Yeah, and we've, we've found multiple hairpins like that at

• 1:57:53Liv Albert?

  Gangevecchio is the place I work at in Sicily and I've seen similar ones, not at the British Museum. If you, if you go to London, go to the museum, the London Museum, which actually has artifacts from the Roman colony of Londinium. One of my favorite parts was they had recreated like a woman's, a woman's vanity table that they've laid out with like her jewelry and her hairpins and the cosmetic tools she would use. And I just loved the recreation of that. So, and again, it's like, if, if we find these artifacts in a room then, and we see them all together, and it's like, yeah, let's think about the space that she was inhabiting, what she was doing there and how that room in particular would have been under her control to some extent. Yeah.

• 1:58:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like her space in a way that probably very little else is. Mm hmm. Yeah. I, I just love all of these little things about how, how are women making themselves known in history? They're, but they, they can't be flashy about it. Aphrodite can't come out and say like, step aside, I'm going to take care of my son. They have to kind of still be in the background and just get by as best they can. That's so interesting to me, particularly how you phrased it too, because I think, so one thing that fascinates me lately is Aeneas, but in the Iliad, because to me, he kind of stands out in a way that basically. Only Achilles does, but he also doesn't have a ton of story attached to him. So he's like

• 1:59:23Liv Albert?

  this minor character who's also obviously super important. And I am just so curious what that meant back then, like to the Greeks, not the Romans, because Romans clearly picked up on it. And they made him into this thing, but he was something before. And anyway, I could, I would love to know more about Aeneas specifically Greek, because it's, he's like in not in anything except the Homeric hymn. And anyway, my point is that in the Iliad, she kind of does save him in this incredibly obvious way. Like she literally whisks him off the battlefield, like just like she does with Paris, like

• 2:00:03Liv Albert?

  saves his ass in a super obvious, like I am a goddess. This is my son. I'm going to save him kind of way. Where to me, it kind of speaks to the differences between, you know, at least, you know, the archaic period or, or before, um, of Greece versus Rome. And like Greek women didn't have a ton of abilities, but I think that the goddesses maybe were able to like at least be a little something more than they were in Rome. I don't know how true that is, but it's so different, the two. Yeah. Or instances of it. Well, and so there was a really, I have to look up because it was a big help for the paper I'm working on and everything. So, um, Barbara Stanley Spath has a book chapter called From Goddess to Hag,

• 2:00:47Liv Albert?

  The Greek and Roman Witch in Classical Literature. Oh my God. Okay. Yeah. Highly recommend. It's a great read and, um, What a good title. I know. And, and she does a wonderful job of just looking at how witches are represented in literature and how that starts to change over time, specifically like how the Greeks are. Receiving witches, how that starts to become more defined in the Hellenistic period. And then the Romans get a hold of it. And, oh, boy, that's where we get evil witches that we think about today. And what, what she suggests is that

• 2:01:28Liv Albert?

  characters like Medea and Kierke or Cersei, or however you say it. I know. I, I say Cersei, but I know it's Kierke.

• 2:01:38Liv Albert?

  Um, so they are presented as being in like the mythological past, like so many of these individuals are like, you can say they existed in a time, you know, the age of heroes, but now we're in the Iron Age and this period sucks, according to Hesiod, but. Everything sucked, according to him.

• 2:01:58Liv Albert?

  So they're in the past and therefore their powers and what they do, they're not heavily described and they're not, they're not bad, they're not evil intentioned, they can use their powers to protect men that they're trying to sleep with or, um, and only if you get on their bad side, like many gods, will they use their powers to harm you. And so they're much more neutral or mixed bag sort of a thing. But eventually in the Hellenistic period, and this is the thing that Stanley Spade didn't notice because she was trying to understand, why do we have this drastic change happening? And what I'm seeing is that it has to do with the development of

• 2:02:39Liv Albert?

  rational medicine that came about with the Hippocratic Corpus in the fifth century where now have a class of men who are trying to define what healthcare looks like. And the best way to define what a profession looks like is to say what it is not. Yes. And what it is not is what women do, is what it really comes to be. And so you have in the Hellenistic period, when Hippocratic medicine is being developed even further in Alexandria, that's eventually where Galen ends up and does a ton of surgeries and writing. Um, in the, oh, I'm blinking on dates all of a sudden. I think he's first or second century CE. I would have no way of knowing, so we're just gonna. Trust you're right. Don't worry.

• 2:03:24Liv Albert?

  I have them written down somewhere, but there's 15 pages to get through and I'm not searching right now. It's fine. Someone can Google. Yeah. So, so Galen is someone who really codifies the Hippocratic Corpus as we know it today. And he, he was actually very angry when people associated like would call him a sorcerer and stuff. He's like, no, that is not what I do. I do rational medicine. This is what rational medicine is. As we see this development of the witch being more defined in like who she worships, the type of rituals she does. And her intentions turn from like neutral or helpful to like just out and out evil. That parallels how medicine is being defined as like the correct way to maintain health.

• 2:04:08Liv Albert?

  It ends up being gendered as a result because Stanley Spade sees that male sorcerers are still being represented as like seekers of knowledge and their powers are being used to help. And the only time that males magicians or sorcerers are talked about negatively is when they're being, being considered charlatans. And charlatans is the same category used by medical professionals. Um, to say like, that is not the correct way to practice medicine. Um, and so male magicians kind of are in this center space. They, they don't get talked about too badly, but then if you add on this extra layer of gender,

• 2:04:53Liv Albert?

  it becomes very easy. Just like medicine is ma- male and rational. Anything else is irrational and women and dangerous.

• 2:05:06Liv Albert?

  I, I mean, I love that. Yeah. I mean, obviously it's so dark, but also it's like, well, yeah, whatever dudes like, I'll take it. Like I'm pulling my day on. And just like. Well, it's, it's very interesting because like Stanley Speth is talking about how, again, these, what these elite men are writing about witches is like, there probably are female magical practitioners as well. But would they have considered themselves healers or would they have called themselves a witch? Or would they have identified in some other way? We won't really know for sure because their practices are just being

• 2:05:47Liv Albert?

  put to one extreme of like, this is, all they do is magic, but that's not all these women do. Archaeologically, we see that many medical practitioners, male and female, are using things like charms, are using incantations, are using things that would, we would identify as magic. Because it put their clients at ease to have both this rational, natural explanation of illness, but to also hearken to the gods or hearken to a higher power to take care of them, which is something we still have today. It hasn't gone away.

• 2:06:26Liv Albert?

  And I think, so the other texts end up referencing a lot is Vivian Newton. I don't know how to say her last name for sure. She has a book on ancient medicine and she just talks about, it's like, we have this very skewed perception, perception of what medicine is because we have these men writing about what they say it is. But if we reverse that and look at patients, they're the ones who truly decide who is a doctor, who is a healer, because they pay for the services. And if they don't like what someone is doing, they will go to someone else.

• 2:07:01Liv Albert?

  And what is very interesting is eventually Hippocratic medicine, we have all of that today because during the medieval Islamic period, those same elite men were taking the Greek stuff and incorporating into their healing practices. But what is interesting is that instead of identifying doctors versus witches, they just come out and say, why are patients going to women who are uneducated?

• 2:07:33Liv Albert?

  And using like spells and random potions to treat people effectively. Because they acknowledged like these women are curing patients and basically taking away income from themselves. So by the medieval period, they've kind of gotten rid of witch and they just realized that women are major competition for them. And so they're just trying to say like, hey, they're not educated, they're not trained, they are not going to be the best option for you. And yet their writing tells us that, but people go to them all the time because that's your mother, that's your aunt, that is someone you grew up around your whole life and they have taken care of you. Why would you go to a stranger and pay them to

• 2:08:18Liv Albert?

  heal you when someone else already takes care of you? Mm hmm. And when it's been, it's worked. So yeah, like, why go somewhere else? That's, that's my favorite part is like, we have some different writings from these medical doctors who are like, it worked, but it only worked because the patient came to me first, didn't give the like, didn't, didn't give my cure long enough to actually work. And then they went to the woman and it got cured. Sure. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. That checks out. And so it's like, I kind of, again, sometimes I just appreciate what men are, are writing and not realizing what they're saying sometimes. Yeah. They're giving themselves away. They are. Yeah.

• 2:09:00Liv Albert?

  It's even just using that phrase, I just think of, that again, still happening today. Like, the way people or the way men give themselves away, like half the time that they're complaining about anything. And you're like, you, you've literally just told on yourself. You've just explained through your complaint, why your complaint is invalid. I read, am I the asshole a little too often? Oh, God, yeah. Like, that is basically what reading some of these documents is like sometimes. It's, it's most of my bad reviews is men telling on themselves. So that's like all I can think of is just the way it's like, it's like, just tell the myths. We don't need to know if the women were being like assaulted all the time. Just, just tell the myths. And I'm like, well, okay, but it, those are the myths.

• 2:09:44Liv Albert?

  So like, go away or stop complaining. Yeah, yeah, I so I I'm teaching a history course right now and I actually love start starting with the Iliad because as an archaeologist, I am highly aware of the fact that human history expands far beyond what was written down. And Homer's a great place to start because there are some factual elements we found archaeologically in the story. And so we start to question like historical accounts being from an oral tradition versus written down. And, you know, I try to have my students investigate, you know, which is the better way to pass on information.

• 2:10:26Liv Albert?

  And most students will point to like the telephone game and how things change over time. And then I'm like, all right, how many of you know ancient Greek? How many of you have translated ancient Greek? And I'm able to show them, I have Fagels and then they read an abridged version of the Iliad by Lombardo. And so I just pull two lines translated by these two different men into English. And it's like, what information is lost between one translation and the other? Because one is much more simplified. And then also, what choices are these men as translators making? So they call the woman, it's where Patroclus is ordering some women to go and fetch

• 2:11:12Liv Albert?

  some bedding for Phoenix who is visiting. And Fagels uses the term serving women. And it's like, but who are these women in a Greek camp, really? They're not choosing to serve anyone. Exactly. And so even when we say written is the better format of passing on information for long periods of time, like, we still actively make choices about how we're representing people of the past that isn't authentic to their lived experience. Yeah, what I've been thinking about lately is like, what version?

• 2:11:48Liv Albert?

  Versions of Homeric epic existed before they got written down, right? Like, because if it's true that one of my recent guests told me that, you know, it was probably written down in like, what, like, fifth, sixth century Athens or something? And it's like, I mean, that's so late in terms of how long it was probably being sung all over the Greek world and like, yeah, what, what versions were there? What different details do we not have, even when it comes to the two sources that we have, you know, quote unquote, in full compared to like everything else that we have so fragmentary? And it's just, I mean, I say it every time, but I, what I wouldn't give for a time machine to just go back.

• 2:12:31Liv Albert?

  Just listen to these people and read everything, but also listen to them.

• 2:12:35Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, and like, I think Pat Barker's book Silence of the Girls, like she has this moment. She takes that moment again from Homer where Bruceus is taking this opportunity at Patroclus's funeral to mourn her brothers who have been killed by the Greeks because she has not been allowed the space to do so beforehand. Because she will be punished for doing so. And to me, like, that little caveat of the story is probably something women were actually, again, the major survivors of these conflicts. That's the kind of stuff they would pass down to their kids and be like, this is what I had to do to survive. And like every once in a while, I think that does appear in our written texts.

• 2:13:20Liv Albert?

  But like, you have to really go looking for it.

• 2:13:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and then meanwhile, we get all the explanations that like, no, Patroclus was probably nice enough to Bruceus that she, you know, like she still mourned his death. And it's like, I mean, I find it unlikely. Even for all the Patroclus of him, like, I don't think she was mourning his death.

• 2:13:37Liv Albert?

  Probably not, no.

• 2:13:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like, he could be the least evil of the Greeks, but he's still one of the Greeks enslaving her.

• 2:13:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's like, maybe as an ally, so your life, like you know, your life could be worse and it's like, there went my best opportunity for the best slave life I could hope for, which is not great.

• 2:13:56Liv Albert?

  But even then, it's like you're mourning your life. You're not mourning Patroclus.

• 2:14:00Liv Albert?

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, General Manager at Safravolkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy. Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, Special Finance Manager at Safracredit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit Safracredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.

• 2:15:06Liv Albert?

  I guess I'll bring it back because I have two more stories to share, basically, that the Romans are telling to help. And so my question is like, going to that original story, women were identified as medica. Like, they earned this title that was recognized by rational medicine. So what, who was considered an acceptable medica in this Roman world where they were anti-Greekness, anti-women, being independent, economically independent? But like, there had to be exceptions, and there appears to be a couple of exceptions. So the story that I came across, and I had not realized was, oh, hang on, I have to,

• 2:15:49Liv Albert?

  I have versions everywhere, is, comes from Hyginus. So Hyginus has a bunch of fables, and the story of Agnotike of Athens comes from that. And she's actually included with this passage of inventors and their inventions. And what I kind of love about it is that her story takes up about a third of the section. Otherwise, it's a bunch of other names that, like Daedalus is listed, for instance. And this is what Hyginus, who dates to the 2nd century CE, this is what he writes about Agnotike. The ancients didn't have obstetricians and as a result, women, because of modesty,

• 2:16:33Liv Albert?

  perished. For the Athenians forbade slaves and women to learn the art of medicine. A certain girl, Agnodyke, a virgin, desired to learn medicine and since she desired it, she cut her hair and in male attire came to a certain Herophilus for training. When she had learned the art and had heard that a woman was in labor, she came to her. And when the woman refused to trust herself to her, thinking that she was a man, she removed her garment to show that she was a woman and in this way she traded, she treated women. When the doctors saw that they were not admitted to women, they began to accuse Agnodyke, saying that she was a seducer and corrupter of women and that the women were pretending to be ill.

• 2:17:16Liv Albert?

  The Ero Pagites, in cession, started to condemn Agnodyke, but Agnodyke removed her garment for them and showed that she was a woman. Then the doctors began to accuse her more vigorously and as a result, the leading women came to the court and said, "You are not husbands but enemies because you condemn her who discovered safety for us." Then the Athenians amended the law so that freeborn women could learn the art of medicine. Holy shit. Right? I've only ever heard that name before and I don't think I've ever actually found the source on it, so I'm just so thrilled with that. I feel like, and maybe I'm just totally misremembering, but I feel like when that story is usually

• 2:17:59Liv Albert?

  referenced, it's not about her practicing medicine? I don't know. All I can think of is just like, yeah, the woman who like flashed all of the people in, in Greece. But I always feel like it makes her seem like that's not why, and now I just can't remember what it is, but that's so incredible. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting, so I looked up the name Herophilus, trying to figure out like if there was something about the etymology of the name that would indicate he was a doctor. That is an actual... Practitioner of Hippocratic medicine that is well-known as like being one of the first surgeons in Alexandria and everything. Huh. And he's not from Athens, but you can tell like this is a Roman writing, you know,

• 2:18:44Liv Albert?

  this is what 700 years after the Hippocratic Corpus was developed and he's just like, "All right, obviously, a woman in Athens would have to learn from a very educated man, what is like the oldest name I know." And that's where she learned medicine from. So it was so real, it was so interesting to see like this real name thrown out there, but there's no indication Herafylus was ever in Athens at all to legitimize her abilities as a medical practitioner. And it's interesting that initially she is acting as like an obstetrician or even in the midwife role, but it quickly talks about like women, the doctors of the city are accusing women of pretending to be ill.

• 2:19:28Liv Albert?

  So she's probably handling other illnesses. Yeah, like they're going to her for everything because they hear about her and they're like, "Well, hell yeah, like I want this woman treating me." Yeah. Especially in Athens. Well, and we see this again in medieval Islamic medicine too. Like a lot of cases, male doctors will write about how they, depending on their female patients, won't necessarily get to see them. It will have to be a woman who comes and performs all the tasks that the doctor would do. And so it's like this idea of modesty really does drive the need for women to be in this space and helping each other. And that's kind of present here.

• 2:20:08Liv Albert?

  So what I get from this story eventually is that ideally what Romans want for their medica to be in this fable is that they are educated by men or educated in the way of men. They are virginal. And by the end of this, which I don't believe this is true, but he states that only free-born women could learn medicine, not slaves. But we know in the Roman world, a lot of slaves were even more highly valued as slaves for their medical knowledge. So it's a very interesting, like we're starting to get a definition of, "All right, if she's not a witch, then she has to be this if we're going to call her a medica, call her a doctor."

• 2:20:53Liv Albert?

  All right, so Amelia Hilaria is a Gallic Roman woman, and she, her nephew, Alceneus, kind of records this epithet to her in a way. I don't think epithet's the right word, but basically is remembering her life after she has passed in his work Parentalia, where he kind of goes through, he has these poems he writes for all of his relatives. And this is the one that I kind of like, ugh, a little bit as I read it. But it really, she's kind of the prime example of what men found acceptable in Medica. Like, it's like, if she's going to be a Medica, she has to be this. Otherwise, she's a witch, she's dangerous, and like, we don't want anything to do with her.

• 2:21:37Liv Albert?

  So, the title for her poem is Amelia Hilaria, My Mother's Sister, An Avowed Virgin. "You two, who through an kinship's degree an aunt, were to me a mother, must now be recalled with a son's affection. Amelia, who in the cradle gained the second name of Hilaris," which here is translated as blivesum, or I almost like read it as accommodating kind of language. "Because bright and cheerful after the fashion of a boy, you made without pretense the very picture of a lad." And so I'm just imagining this like tomboyish figure, growing up, and it's being described with all these qualities of a young boy,

• 2:22:21Liv Albert?

  and eventually, "based in the art of healing like a man." So eventually, she is trained in the art of healing as a man. And some people read this as like very sexist, just... But I think our general understanding now is that the rational kind of medicine that is being practiced at this point, because now we're in the 4th century CE, and magic and medicine have been very clearly defined as polar opposites of each other. This is the part that gets me. "You ever hated your female sex? So there grew up in you the love of consecrated maidenhood. Through three and sixty years, you maintained it, and your life's end was also a maiden's end." I don't like.

• 2:23:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's gross. It's gross, but if we ask some questions of it, there's some, there's something really cool there. Again, thinking about, okay, she's a medical practitioner, so she could be asexual. She could be a lesbian because virgin does not mean never had sex. No, just not married. The other thing to consider is that with, like, we know that there are um, different types of herbs that were used in the ancient world to prevent pregnancy effectively. So she could have knowledge of this and be engaging in sexual relations with men and just never got pregnant. So you would never know. Or the other part, which also seems very realist, realistic is

• 2:23:49Liv Albert?

  seems to have grown up very independent and just realized that if like she wants to maintain that independence, she has to dedicate herself to her virginity. And there's something tied to medicine in that regard, too, where Aphrodite is, is a cult figure. And we see that, interestingly enough, like the cult of Asclepius is that arises and everything. That almost also legitizes, legitimizes medicine because part of what makes witches so dangerous, especially in the Roman period, is their ability to control natural phenomenon, which had belonged to the gods before. So there is some thought that witches have the ability to control gods.

• 2:24:35Liv Albert?

  Which is problematic. And that's how charlatans are talked about is like people who go around saying like they can make the gods do things that aren't natural. They're bad. That's not real medicine. And so when the cult of Asclepius also helps to really define medicine in this time, because you either practice medicine as part of the priesthood to Asclepius. And what's interesting is like Hippocrates and Galen both have claims to the cult of Asclepius. Interestingly enough, just to further legitimize the practice. So in this case, her choosing a virg, to be a virgin might relate to how priestesses at that time, especially the vestal virgins, also had to do that and maintain that to maintain the legitimacy of their practice.

• 2:25:20Liv Albert?

  So there's a few different ways to interpret that, but Yeah. Apparently sixty-three years of being a virgin was the requirement to be a good medica. God.

• 2:25:31Liv Albert?

  And it ends, you cherished me with your press ups and your love as a might, as might a mother, and therefore, as a son, I make you this return at your last rites. And it really just brings back, like, he thought it was important to mention the medicine, but it's really the care of himself, like a mother would, that is what resonates with him. And I think that's what most of the women practicing medicine or just healing arts of any kind, like, they were just people who cared about other people. Which I think is, you know, that's something we still desire in medicine today is like,

• 2:26:10Liv Albert?

  you don't want to just go to a very clean, quiet, white space and have someone ask you very basic questions and then be so clinical. You want them to care because it's your health, it's your life. And I think that's why even today, there's such a huge pushback against what we call biomedicine, because it is so clinical and rational and humans aren't that, humans have never been that, humans have gone to the gods and to the doctor to make themselves better. And if we continue to try and define the two fields as not connected, people are going to be turned off to biomedicine, as we've seen with COVID as a result.

• 2:26:56Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting. I love the idea. It's interesting timing. I just, the episode I released today, at the time of this recording at least, was on Artemis, where I kind of fixed past things I'd said and clarified that virgin doesn't mean virgin, because I think I just hadn't really said anything before and just used that word, because in my head, I know that that doesn't explicitly mean she'd never had sex. But yeah, that just like- Because Artemis kind of represented that as well in a way that, you know, just in the way that she had that freedom.

• 2:27:27Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:27:27Liv Albert?

  Like she got it from like day one, you know, according to that, the Calimachus hymn she got. She asked her father to keep her, you know, keep her maidenhood so that she could do whatever the hell she wanted. And to me, it's like, that's just badass. She just was like, no, I don't want to get married. I want to have a complete, completely free life because I won't be under the thumb of my husband. And which is basically what this doctor did, you know? She was like, no, I'm going to not get married. I'm not going to have anyone else control me and I'm going to become a doctor. Like, that's amazing.

• 2:28:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And it's interesting to see that those choices existed. Like, Mm hmm. You didn't have to meet this expectation that we have set for like when you say Roman woman, it's like there's very limited roles that we imagined for them, but that was not the case. There, you had limited choices, but you still had choices. And to me, that's, that's so cool. So this is actually a really cool story as well, because this dedication is from the parents to a daughter. And we actually have the mother's name as well. And we learned that the mother was a freed woman. So she learned medicine and she passed it on to

• 2:29:09Liv Albert?

  her daughter, Scantia. And the epigraph dedicated to her, to Scantia Redempta by her parents, reads that with Scantia's death, her husband all at once lost his wife, his own personal physician, and his principal source of revenue.

• 2:29:27Liv Albert?

  And I'm like, that is a sick burn from

• 2:29:31Liv Albert?

  some parents right there that I really appreciate. That is so good. It's like, ah, just little things like that where it's like, not only were women in these roles, they were kicking ass in these roles. And like, that family recognized like how amazing that skill was. And they appreciated it.

• 2:29:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's a good family. That's wonderful. Oh, my God. And it, you know, these are what we might think of today as like the working class families who aren't in the literature most of the time. So again, this perception of, all right, you have these rich, literate men writing about what they think medicine is, but in practice, and what people valued in people taking care of them probably differed greatly from what was, what we have preserved today in literature. So little, little things like that always just bring a smile to my face. Absolutely, as they should. I mean, I am just, I'm generally so fascinated by what, yeah, what we don't know based on the literature, because like you said, I mean,

• 2:30:37Liv Albert?

  the stuff that gets written down is so deeply skewed. And let alone the stuff that gets kept, right? Like, it's not to say that, that women weren't writing things down, or that people sympathetic to women weren't writing things down. But in order for something that was written down to survive, it had to survive like, I mean, however, many hundreds or thousands of years of other people thinking this is worth me copying, or this is worth me preserving in some way, i- until you get to like the random things that have survived, like Sappho. And that's because of just like the randomness of Papyrus being able to survive, right? Yep. Yeah, and that's

• 2:31:21Liv Albert?

  It's so incredible. That's why medicine is especially interesting to study because medicine, rich people in particular, are interested in anything that is going to prolong their life. And so there's always been Age old thing? Yeah, there's always been this investment in producing and reproducing medical knowledge. So that's why we have the Hippocratic Corpus, a lot of it from the fifth century, not all of it by any means. And then why Galen's writings and so many writings from that in medicine is preserved is because when it was being copied and translated in the medieval Islamic world, that was priority because these rich men wanted to live for a long time.

• 2:32:04Liv Albert?

  And these are also the same men who were buying magic bowls and things like that with with spell inscriptions on the side. They're they're covering all of their bases. Yes. Which I I think is really cool, too. So

• 2:32:20Liv Albert?

  the the one thing we do see of women's contribution to medical literature is when they are credited in the work of men for pharmacia, like, so there are cures that are made with herbs and everything that if if Galen really liked that recipe and agrees that it works, he'll actually include it. And we do have a few names of women in that regard. But it's not always clear if they were actual practitioners or if it was like a family recipe passed on for a long time. My my other favorite is there are some texts that are attributed to Cleopatra. But these texts, again, are mostly on cosmetics. And so there's a debate of, all right, are you just using that name? Because it has this great

• 2:33:06Liv Albert?

  I'm marketing aspects to it of like, that was beautiful, you know, the the one who ensnared Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and you want to look as beautiful as her, here, read her book. And Yeah. Just women write it. I mean, that sounds like an awful big coincidence if that's what she wrote, given however many languages she spoke and like how generally brilliant and strategic she was. I have a feeling she wasn't writing down

• 2:33:33Liv Albert?

  Make up tips, but you never know, I suppose.

• 2:33:35Liv Albert?

  Never know. But yeah, so it is, it's like when women appear in texts, it really is for the benefit of men a lot of the time. So.

• 2:33:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's so fascinating. What you were saying too earlier about the staying power of of medical texts. Galen is like, is he the most preserved author? He's something like that, right? Where more of his survives than like almost everything else.

• 2:34:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, because the, the um, medical practitioners of um, the Islamic world really liked his work. So they, a lot of them, not only just copied it, but they commented on it. They had their own versions and they would engage with the text. So um, even if you don't have an exact copy of like what his work was, you have people engaging with the text. So you can still reconstruct a lot of what Galen was saying versus like, but this is what I think instead. So yes, he was just very well liked, um, for whatever reason. He's kind of an iffy guy. My, my favorite story about him is

• 2:34:43Liv Albert?

  he was kicked out of Rome the first time because he's, he's originally from Anatolia. Um, from, ah, what's that place?

• 2:34:54Liv Albert?

  Ephesus is the only place I know.

• 2:34:57Liv Albert?

  That sounds right. Yeah. So he's from there. He goes and gets training in Alexandria and he, he actually works as a surgeon for for a person who owns gladiators because you actually need to maintain your gladiators. They are an investment and you don't want them dying that easily. So that's where he got a lot of his surgical training and eventually he makes his way to Rome. He does like demonstrations, uh, kind of very cruel experiments on animals in particular that are not great to hear about. But he pisses off a bunch of doctors in Rome. So he kind of gets kicked out the first time. And then eventually, uh, Marcus Aurelius calls him to the front lines to be his doctor.

• 2:35:41Liv Albert?

  He's like, okay, I'm gonna work for the emperor. Let's do it. And he gets there. And Marcus Aurelius is left because plague has broken out. So he's like returned to Rome to avoid getting, getting sick. And so, uh,

• 2:35:56Liv Albert?

  You can tell that Galen is pretty upset by this because he makes his way to Rome and Marcus Aurelius is going to head back to the front lines and Galen's like, so listen, Asclepius sent me this dream and he says that's not a good idea. So please don't send me there. And Marcus Aurelius agrees. He's like, okay, that's fine. You stay here and take care of Commodus.

• 2:36:17Liv Albert?

  Fun.

• 2:36:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, of Joaquin Phoenix fame from Gladiator.

• 2:36:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:36:22Liv Albert?

  And he hated it. And I'm like, that was just poetic on so many levels.

• 2:36:28Liv Albert?

  That's great. I didn't know that they, I, I know so little of Rome, but I know names. So I had no idea that Galen like matched up with that at all. That's, yeah. And then of course, you know, I know names often specifically to what movies I have seen.

• 2:36:43Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 2:36:44Liv Albert?

  I'm much better at Greece, but Rome escapes me for sure.

• 2:36:48Liv Albert?

  That was me. Like my first love was Greece and then I just happened to dig at a Roman site. And so I had to learn a lot over the last few years. And even then, when people are asking me emperors and wars and things happening, I'm like, I'm just focused on this, this one lady here in the countryside and taking care of people and what her life looked like. I don't know what was happening in Rome at the time.

• 2:37:13Liv Albert?

  That's fair. I feel like that's best. Like stay out of the Roman military stuff. That's what I don't want any part in.

• 2:37:19Liv Albert?

  And it's, you know, that's, that's what's kind of cool too, is when you do get, when you get away from the literature and you're focusing on just like these people in the province and what their everyday lives looked like, you kind of, you really do get that aspect of like, how much would a war up in England or something, how much would that resonate for a person living in Sicily at the time? It probably doesn't register at all.

• 2:37:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Like, why would it? Yeah.

• 2:37:45Liv Albert?

  And so it's, it's like, I know those, like all events trickle down and shape our personal lives to some extent, but. I also, you know, I don't know what Biden did today exactly. Because it's just not in my thoughts, but when big decisions happen, it can have an impact. But most of the time, you're not thinking about it too much.

• 2:38:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that's so true and so interesting because I think, and certainly why I stay away from Rome is like, is all of the military buffs who I just don't want to hear from. But really, you know, it was a big place and there were people just existing and living their lives and doing these cool things, like medicine and everything. And that's just, that's so intriguing. It what you said, like, right at the very top about Rome being when witches become evil. So I, I had a guest on the show back around Halloween to talk about Roman witches. And that's just so true. And it didn't really occur to me. I think actually I did say something about that, like the difference between Greek and Roman witches.

• 2:38:49Liv Albert?

  But like, of course, it's, it's such a Rome thing to be like, yeah, like, I mean, the Greeks did not treat their women particularly well, but they didn't make them all evil. Like, and especially if you're divine at all, or have this kind of power of like, it's, you have the difference between Roman and Greek witches. Because it was, it was Maxwell Paul, who was on my show and talking about the, the witch that's in, um, in a Horus poem and this witch is described in the most wild and like comedic and horrific. And like, just it's the most absurd description of a human woman. And then I compare it to like my knowledge of Circe and Medea and Hecate and these who are badass.

• 2:39:34Liv Albert?

  And sure, Medea does bad things, whatever, but she's badass throughout. She's respectable. She's not made to be this comedic mess.

• 2:39:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah, there's a, and like it, some, some of the differences are just, they're not even subtle. Like Circe and Medea are young and beautiful.

• 2:39:56Liv Albert?

  And Erycto and Candida are old and ugly and sex obsessed and.

• 2:40:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it was it was Candida that that we talked about on my show and I was you are this is a wild character like just an absolute monster. Meanwhile, exactly like Hecate and and Cersei and I guess Hecate is not described very much, but she's a goddess either way. But Cersei and Medea and like, oh, yeah, the comparison is really something else.

• 2:40:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and it's it's kind of interesting that I think my first exposure to Roman witches was the witches in Apuleius's Golden Ass or Metamorphoses. And I love the story of Moroi, like, she's just a whole town upset her, so she's gonna lock everyone in their houses until she gets what she wants and then carries on with her way. But there's actually, there's also a woman who spoke out against her and she has the ability to stop her pregnancy in terms of like, she's just gonna be pregnant for a long time until the until she gets this witch to forgive her.

• 2:41:07Liv Albert?

  And it's a very interesting parallel. There is a record at Epidavros, the cult of Asclepius in Greece, where supposedly a woman went there saying like, hey, I want to get pregnant. But it was one of those weird wish things where Asclepius is like, okay. And she was pregnant for like two years supposedly and she had to go back. It's like, I would like to give birth now. He's like, oh, you should have like specified.

• 2:41:36Liv Albert?

  That sounds like an oracle pronouncement where you're like, you have to just guess correctly in what in what the oracle actually means.

• 2:41:44Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 2:41:45Liv Albert?

  Or or ask a very. Very, very specific question.

• 2:41:48Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. And so it's like, I see, you know, that connection to childbirth and the power to and Ila Thea and the mother of Artemis and Apollo, who has the ability through a certain action of stopping a pregnancy from happening. And so I, I love stories like that because it's, it's so much of woman's health, unfortunately, is tied to her womb. And whether or not that womb is behaving or being hysterical or and unfortunately, like healthcare for women in the ancient world, as written by men, is, oh, something's wrong, get pregnant and that will solve the problem.

• 2:42:33Liv Albert?

  That is probably eight times out of 10, the cure for women.

• 2:42:39Liv Albert?

  Oh, God. That's like a death sentence.

• 2:42:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's not great. So, so this connection that women always have to childbirth in particular, like that is always a role women, that's always the space women have occupied. It just goes to show like how unknowledgeable a lot of men are about it because women always took care of that. And it, it would be really interesting to know, um, there is an exception, Saranis and Galen both write about midwifery. And I think one of them has a work called Gynecology. And Saranis in particular gives like a, a pretty apt description of like what makes a very good midwife, like what kind of tools she should have. Um, but it's also tied to her education and things like that.

• 2:43:26Liv Albert?

  But as people have pointed out, it's like how many women, especially of lower classes, would have actually been literate. And, but they are still going out and practicing this and taking care of it. So I, the fact that witches are also tied to childbirth and the ability to not let it happen and to actually let it happen is, to me, always alludes back to this connection to midwifery skills and things like that. So.

• 2:43:53Liv Albert?

  Absolutely. I can't believe the timing of this because I didn't think about it at all. I I did this Artemis episode on a whim because I the episode I had planned got screwed up. But Artemis also is is a goddess of childbirth. And and I was reading through part of this hymn by Calymachus, which is where we get kind of all of the detailed description of her sort of origin story, because no one talked about her all that much before that. And he's Hellenistic, which is interesting, too. But there's a very specific moment where they're talking about childbirth and how Artemis has the ability to take away the pain from her mother.

• 2:44:32Liv Albert?

  Like even giving birth to Artemis herself and then Apollo too of like just completely taking away that pain. And of course, in the in the moment of researching this, I didn't think anything of that because I don't think about medicine and I don't ever think about childbirth, thank the gods. But now I'm seeing it too is like that is part of the same thing of of the ability to alleviate pain in childbirth would, I'm sure, have been a major skill in people who were dealing with this. And I don't know if they, you know, connected it with Artemis in in that way. But it's fascinating to know that they are so explicit about these goddesses who have this this ability when it comes to childbirth and like the details of what they could do, including

• 2:45:18Liv Albert?

  making it less painful, making it an easy process, like all of these things that would have been so legitimately important back then when it came to childbirth and like life saving and and how kind of real they were, even even with the goddesses, let alone humanity.

• 2:45:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, there is on Cyprus, there is a very old terracotta model of childbirth that they think was actually used by women to show

• 2:45:45Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:45:46Liv Albert?

  like steps of like how to take care of a woman giving birth. And eventually, I mean, this is where I was coming from for my research is like, oh, childbirth imagery doesn't exist except in the very myth mythological representations. And they like to do like Athena springing from Zeus's head. Again, a very androcentric view of childbirth.

• 2:46:09Liv Albert?

  There's a great one of Gaia, like, holding up a baby out of the ground where she's like half in the earth because she is the earth and she's just like holding up a little baby, which is like a little bit less, I suppose, andromatcentric, but it's not super practical.

• 2:46:21Liv Albert?

  And that's just it, is like, I kept hearing, it's like, oh, the Greeks and the Romans, like, they viewed it as something icky, as something like they didn't want to depict in their artwork. And then it's like, well, then where did this fragment come from? Like, that is a very explicit, and it like, it looks painful. It's a very explicit scene of childbirth. And it's like, it just didn't appear out of nowhere.

• 2:46:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:44Liv Albert?

  And I do believe more of those images exist in the archaeological record, and I'm hoping we'll see more of it. But another thing that was pointed out is, over time, like, you do have a movement away from, we see some representations in Egypt as well of actually more realistic depictions of women in labor and childbirth. But what becomes a very popular scene is, is switching to the khorotrophos, the woman nursing instead. Which I, I think is also probably an interesting pattern because of other slaves that are highly valued for their role as women is nursemaids. And you will actually see a lot of women

• 2:47:23Liv Albert?

  gain income and gain their freedom from some of the former children they took care of and were nursemaids to.

• 2:47:32Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:47:33Liv Albert?

  And I think that follows, you know, infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates in the world, ancient world can be so abysmal sometimes, that having your mother might often not be the one who actually got to care for you again. So the fact that she gave childbirth might have not been as important as the nursemaid, the woman who actually fed you and cared for you. Because I think those two things did become distinct at some point, because so many women were dying in childbirth, that this image focusing more on nursing became like, kind of the best representation of the mother-infant relationship.

• 2:48:16Liv Albert?

  Because that might have just been the reality for a lot of people growing up, that if your mother didn't die giving birth to you, but she's expected to give birth to multiple children, she probably did die in childbirth at some point.

• 2:48:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, because I mean, I could only imagine how many they would have had as well, and let alone the risks. Oh, my God. It's all horrifying, that part. But this is also interesting.

• 2:48:42Liv Albert?

  And I I forget what the drug is supposed to be, but like, we see stuff all the time of like, what women were attempting to use to prevent pregnancy. Like, that was a very real thing that women were doing, to the point that, like, Augustus is making a law to try and control female sexual behavior. But also, it's like, if you have, I think it's three children, and you're you're a Roman citizen, then you don't, you no longer have to have a male be your, they call it your tutor, but basically, like, you are independent, like, you have your own individual to make business decisions and things like that.

• 2:49:22Liv Albert?

  If you have, like, a certain amount of children. So like, huh. So like, the, you know, the government was actively promoting women giving birth to children. And that's kind of what's interesting to see now is like in the United States, it's like, the birth rate is dropping. It's like, huh, I wonder why.

• 2:49:40Liv Albert?

  Really? Oh, my God.

• 2:49:41Liv Albert?

  And, you know, here in the US, we're dealing with this challenge to Roe versus Wade. And like, what that does is forces women to have more children for the benefit of this elder population, who is control of the government, and you need a younger population to take care of you, and you can't work anymore. So it's not surprising these laws are trying to control women's bodies again and force us back to functioning as a womb and not anything else without actually providing resources for the actual childcare to raise that population.

• 2:50:20Liv Albert?

  Well, and even And maternity leave and paternity leave and anything like and oh my god, I'm perpetually in horror of what happens down there. I mean, it's not great up here for different reasons, but thankfully abortion is rarely on the table here. But it's just, it's so horrifying. Yeah, it's, yeah, controlling those with the uterus is just ugh, and never ending. And oh my gosh.

• 2:50:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and that's, that's partly why I love investigating these alternative forms of care in the ancient world because biomedicine for a long time was strictly for that purpose of a woman is healthy if her womb is working correctly. That is how women's health is defined and that is not what my entire life is about, so.

• 2:51:08Liv Albert?

  I'm never gonna use mine. Thank god. Not ever. I don't care if it's even there.

• 2:51:14Liv Albert?

  It's so frustrating sometimes and and again, it's like, that's why even things like the anti-vaxxer movement, there's no surprise that here in the US, that started with very liberal women because they have looked at systems like this that actively have tried to control their bodies and they're like, I don't know, let's see what aromatherapy and crystals will do, which is not something I recommend either, but um, you know, there's, there's studies of like, there's this huge study on

• 2:51:45Liv Albert?

  heart health that went over a span of years and every single participant in it was a man. And they, it's like, no wonder we don't know what symptoms of heart attacks look like in women because our research was based on men to begin with. And that's, that's always where, um, and where that comes in is because for some reason biomedicine, which has been defined by men for a long time, they looked at the hormones that women's bodies produce. And they said, oh, that's going to mess up our studies. Like, those are variables we can't control.

• 2:52:24Liv Albert?

  That is, I can't even fathom that. This doesn't make any fucking sense.

• 2:52:27Liv Albert?

  No.

• 2:52:27Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, control the fucking variables then, because it's half the population. Are you fucking kidding? It sounds like, you know, and, and I know this is a Huge issue in the States and I'm sure in Canada too. But the ways in which medicine has defined people who weren't white and and care for for people who weren't white. And and of course, I mean, let alone like gender nonconforming and and trans people and and what they have to deal with with all of that. And I'm conscious of, you know, I don't think we should not use the word women, but also it does apply to people with uteruses generally. But that's not the right proper plural of uterus live. We're talking about Rome.

• 2:53:09Liv Albert?

  But yeah, I mean, just the ways in which medicine generally has been all about white men. And like as if as if they're the only people that exist.

• 2:53:20Liv Albert?

  Well, and famously like modern gynecology came about by experimenting on the bodies of enslaved African American women. Specifically because at one point, trade to bring slaves into the country was banned. And that meant, all right, you need to have the population you do have here reproduce as much as possible. And that is what our modern gynecological medicine is based upon.

• 2:53:50Liv Albert?

  That is so horrifying. And I always, I mean, I I don't forget, but I think it gets lost, especially again, like as a Canadian, but I'm sure it gets lost in the States too, because it's like actively not taught. But the the amount of time that the States continued to have enslaved people after it was seen as completely horrific, like everywhere else, basically. And the way that then the ways, the the lengths that they went to to keep it that way is always shocking, even if it shouldn't be. But wow.

• 2:54:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So.

• 2:54:26Liv Albert?

  Well, we've brought it roll low.

• 2:54:28Liv Albert?

  I know. I do have one last parting quote that like

• 2:54:32Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 2:54:32Liv Albert?

  I found that it's not Greek or Roman, but it it gives meaning to my own research that I really like. And it was, it comes from, I believe, a letter by Marie E. Zakruska, who was a doctor in 1881. And this is what she wrote, "Will there ever be a monument to the first woman physician? We need such landmarks of civilization, not because those who died have lived for fame, no, but because the now living, as well as those who live long afterward, need encouragement for utilizing their capabilities. And monuments of this sort suggested them the possibility of their doing. The person who is covered by a monument is of no consequence,

• 2:55:14Liv Albert?

  but the fact that a woman can work and make an impression upon civilization needs to be known to be remembered."

• 2:55:21Liv Albert?

  That's so beautiful.

• 2:55:22Liv Albert?

  I know. It's like.

• 2:55:24Liv Albert?

  And important and true. And oh, my gosh, how like, how beautifully said, too.

• 2:55:29Liv Albert?

  I, yeah, it's like, I can't say it better than that.

• 2:55:32Liv Albert?

  No.

• 2:55:33Liv Albert?

  I, I wanted to introduce these women who were engaged in healthcare, both imagined and real, like they existed. They've been here for a long time and hopefully more research will be done to uncover their stories.

• 2:55:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you so much for sharing them here. Like, this is always true at the end of a conversation, but I just like sit here with like all of the surprise and and excitement. And oh, my God, it's just my favorite thing in the world to get to have these conversations. So thank you so much.

• 2:56:06Liv Albert?

  Thank you. I was very excited to share it. And it's always great to have conversations with people who are passionate about similar things and makes me feel good about what I'm doing. So.

• 2:56:18Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm so glad and my listeners are gonna love this. Like I I'm constant, not not surprised, but like I'm just constantly getting like this feedback about how much my listeners love these conversation episodes, which is is so huge for me because this started as like just a nonsense thing of me doing and rambling on and on and, you know, did not begin particularly intelligently or academically. And then now I get to have like these incredibly smart people and and share it. And my listeners are so keen for it. And that's so cool for me. So, oh, my gosh, it's such a thrill.

• 2:56:52Liv Albert?

  And someone who wants to get out of the publisher parish, like, system of academia, this is how I prefer to like disseminate information. Like, I want it to be a conversation that is accessible to people because to me, that is how like these very human stories is what we connect on and not like the high technical writing put behind a paywall and journals and things like that. So.

• 2:57:18Liv Albert?

  That's the thing, right? Like, and it you spread it to people beyond the field. And I think that's so important because why not? Like, why not share this with people who are not academically learning about this ancient world? Because it's just as beneficial to learn, if not more so, because it's completely beyond, you know, what people study in their regular lives or just how they live their lives. And then they're learning this incredibly cool new thing. So I'm very grateful that so many fancy scholars agree with you and want to share my show. Is there anything? Well, not is there anything, but will you tell my listeners where to find more on you, more of your of anything and including your podcast? And just please share every and anything you want?

• 2:58:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, let me, because I always forget my own handle for some reason.

• 2:58:06Liv Albert?

  That's totally fair. You're not alone. This happens a lot.

• 2:58:09Liv Albert?

  On Twitter, you can find me at CM Vogue, just like the magazine is my handle. And I am also part of the podcast, Movies We Dig. We've got two archaeologists and a classicist talking about the ancient world. And you can find that on Twitter as well, at Dig underscore Movies. So hopefully we'll get some new listeners through this.

• 2:58:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and I don't know what I will and will not keep from earlier. So just to say, I will be on the show soon enough. We're just figuring out when, but to, yeah, that'll be really, I don't, I won't give away what I'm talking about. But safe to say, everyone who's listening right now is going to love it. So we'll definitely send people that way.

• 2:58:53Liv Albert?

  We are so excited because like, besides actually talking about the ancient world, my other favorite thing is we tell these stories in new formats all the time. And like, what does that say about us as a society? And when we retell these stories in new ways? So like, that's the whole other side of the conversation I like to have. And I'm very excited to have you join us there.

• 2:59:17Liv Albert?

  So am I. Oh, my gosh. And I, it's a thing that I've never seen and it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot. It's gonna be interesting.

• 2:59:23Liv Albert?

  It's gonna be nuts. I, I'm excited for it. Um, I have seen some things that I did not even know existed before. So it's, it's a really fun thing to do, for sure.

• 2:59:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, truly, thank you so much for doing this. It's been such a thrill. I've learned so much and it's just the best. Oh, my gosh.

• 2:59:41Liv Albert?

  Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I look forward to listening to the other conversations you'll have as well.

• 3:00:01Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so much for listening. Again, you can check out additional episodes with Kristy Vogler. Just scroll through what was just in March of last year or search her name in the podcast app and you're gonna find it. I highly recommend those other episodes, too. Honestly, I went back and forth about which ones I was gonna replay today. But I just really love the Helen King episode. So being able to combine it with Christie's first was ideal. But if you want to learn more, I recommend it. And tomorrow, I'm going to be giving you another combination episode of some things that I want you all to relearn. And again, just we've got 800 episodes of this podcast. And sometimes I've just trod the same thing already,

• 3:00:45Liv Albert?

  and you all need to hear it again. And enter my ideal anniversary episodes. Because happy birthday to me. You're giving me a little bit less work. Thank you all. On Friday, though, don't worry, we'll be back with a reading episode of The Odyssey. And maybe I'll rant and ramble a bit more. We'll see. We'll see how many more absurd messages I get about defending Christopher Nolan's absurdly and overtly misogynist choices. That'll probably dictate how I feel on Friday. Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangas is the harmiest of my Olympians, my incredible producer. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, where we are trying to bring you more and more and more. And you know, here we are.

• 3:01:29Liv Albert?

  Kristy Vogler, part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. Check out all of the other shows. We're doing good stuff. It is early in the morning, and I am going to stop rambling now. You should listen to the podcast ad free and with bonus things by subscribing to the Patreon at patreon.com/MythsBaby. Just generally, help us keep it going in this collapse of

• 3:01:59Liv Albert?

  empire and capitalism. I am Liv, and I love this shit. And I'm not going mad at all. We're all a little mad. It's fine.

• 3:02:58Liv Albert?

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome. The much awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart. And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 3:03:42Liv Albert?

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