5 Physicians, Midwives, and Female Patients

Abstract

When drawing on Arabic medical texts in an attempt to shed light on how women experienced infertility, we must ask the question: did the ideas articulated in these texts ever have a practical impact on the way medieval infertile women were treated or how they perceived their infertility? After all, what we have are theories and practices described in books, in a world in which the vast majority of women were not taught to read. While some biographical dictionaries include accounts of individual women who did master a particular body of oral or written texts (such as ḥadīth literature, or poetry), we have no such account in the realm of medicine. Therefore, Arabo-Galenic gynecology could have practical implications only if male participants in this literate medical culture shared this culture with female medical practitioners or communicated their ideas directly to female patients. One might well assume, as Manfred Ullmann does, that neither of these things could occur, on the grounds that women would have lacked interest in male opinions about female bodies, or on the grounds that modesty concerns made such interactions taboo. The extant sources, however, do not buttress such assumptions, and instead point at a very different state of affairs. As a caveat to her own scholarship on ancient gynecological theories, Monica Green writes: