Women’s Nature in the Hippocratic Writings and the Emergence of Gynecology

As an antidote to a bias in the literature that has always made the male more visible, Hippocrates’s
novel way of making the woman, produced a new entity for observation, and led to the emergence of a
new profession of medicine, gynecology. In this way, the “white armed” women of ancient times were
brought into the realm of the visible. Examination of the case histories of women in the corpus revealed
that the observational style was used in light of two principles, that of nature as an active force,
generally for healing, and water as a function and humor; both the nature and water concepts uniting
the analytical and the metaphorical in a holistic way. The nature inspiration enables an ecological view
of Hippocratic practice in such a way that later categories described by Kuhn as incommensurable are
seen to function in interrelation. The theoretical trajectory therefore, involves a short survey which
starts with Popper and follows through Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and finally Crombie, with the
latter’s concept of “styles of thinking” which accounts for how habits of thought inform specific
practices like Hippocratic gynecology.