One of the best-known stories from the ancient Greek medical texts tells of a slave entertainer who became pregnant but didn’t know what to do about it. In one of the versions that survived, from the Hippocratic treatise On Generation/Nature of the Child, she realized she was pregnant and told her owner, who in… Continue reading What women know about sex (and eggs)
Category: pregnancy
Women have ways? Seeds, wombs and ‘legitimate rape’
In an infamous and much-repeated comment made in 2012, US Republican Todd Akin claimed that ‘if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’. Not surprisingly, he was ridiculed for the lack of knowledge of biology that this comment betrays. It didn’t take long, though, before history started to… Continue reading Women have ways? Seeds, wombs and ‘legitimate rape’
Pregnancy between East and West
(image courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco) Sometimes you come across an image that really sticks in your mind. I recently attended a workshop on the representation of the womb across time, and one of the papers introduced me to this striking image… Continue reading Pregnancy between East and West
Mistaking histories 