Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History pp 291–310Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Ancient Medical Sources in the Chapters about Sterility of Rodrigo de Castro’s De universa mulierum medicina

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 799 Accesses

Abstract

Rodrigo de Castro (c. 1546–1627) was a Portuguese medical author exiled in Hamburg, where he wrote De universa mulierum medicina (1603). This chapter will identify the ancient sources cited in the chapters about sterility, and analyse how Castro relied upon classical medical, biological, and philosophical texts to structure his views. The chapter considers his suggested types, causes, and therapies for female and male sterility, and the legal, social, and moral implications of sterility. More broadly, the chapter will demonstrate the connections between sexuality, conception, and fertility in early modern medical texts, reconsider the validity of Thomas Laqueur’s influential ‘one-sex model’, and show how early modern authors drew on the authority of ancient medical sources to justify the attribution of blame to men and women in theories of infertility.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Notes

  1. 1.

    See especially Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Classical World (London, 2011). See also Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (New York, 1993).

  2. 2.

    Rodrigo de Castro, Medicus politicus (Hamburg, 1614), Book 3, Chapter 22, p. 194.

  3. 3.

    Castro, Medicus politicus, Book 4, Chapter 9, p. 251.

  4. 4.

    Florbela Veiga Frade and Sandra Neves Silva, ‘Medicina e política em dois físicos judeus portugueses de Hamburgo: Rodrigo de Castro e o Medicus politicus (1614), e Manuel Bocarro Rosales e o Status astrologicus (1644)’, Sefarad, 71:1 (2011). The texts cited from the Universa mulierum medicina are from the 1628 edition. Unless otherwise stated, the translations of the Greek and Latin texts are my own.

  5. 5.

    Marcus Fabius Calvus, Hippocratis Coi octoginta volumina (Rome, 1525).

  6. 6.

    Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 25.

  7. 7.

    See especially Helen King, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Aldershot, 2007); Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2013).

  8. 8.

    Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London and New York, 1998).

  9. 9.

    Translated in Ann Elis Hanson, ‘Hippocrates’ Diseases of Women 1’, Signs, 1:2 (1975), p. 582.

  10. 10.

    Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Pre-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2011), p. 147.

  11. 11.

    Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York, 2006).

  12. 12.

    On Soranus’ survival in the West, see Ann Elis Hanson and Monica Green, ‘Soranus of Ephesus: Methodicorum princeps’, ANRW, 37:2 (1994).

  13. 13.

    King, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology, pp. 1–7.

  14. 14.

    On Herophilus’ anatomy, see Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria: Edition, Translation, and Essays (Cambridge and New York, 1989), pp.183–6, 230–4.

  15. 15.

    On the problems in Galen’s reasoning, see Michael Boylan, ‘Galen’s Conception Theory’, Journal of the History of Biology, 19:1 (1986).

  16. 16.

    Semen mulierem habere et quid in foetus constitutione opis id conferat.

  17. 17.

    Liber primus de morbis cunctis foeminis communibus.

  18. 18.

    Liber secundus de affectibus, qui viduis, ac virginibus accident.

  19. 19.

    Sterilitas est quaedam impotentia ac difficultas mulieris, viro utentis, ad concipiendum debito tempore.

  20. 20.

    Prima fit a vitio naturali, et cognito.

  21. 21.

    Secunda per collationem foeminae, ad proprium virum.

  22. 22.

    Tertia ex morboso affectu, et ob diuersas affectiones.

  23. 23.

    Quarta est earum, quae pepererunt, verum a primo aut secundo partu steriles factae sunt, et haec dicitur sterilitas ad tempus.

  24. 24.

    In simili decocto maritus pedes lavet.

  25. 25.

    Vir etiam post lotionem pedum, inungat penem balsamo.

  26. 26.

    The connection of Book 10 to the remaining books of History of Animals and its authorship are problematic. On this, see Philip van der Eijk, ‘On Sterility (Hist. an. 10), A Medical Work by Aristotle’, Classical Quarterly, 49 (1999), p. 490ff.

  27. 27.

    Causa sterilitatis duplex, una a viro, altera a foemina prodit, 90.

  28. 28.

    Allium expurgatum pessi forma adormiturae utero subdito, et si odor vel sapor postridie ad os pervenerit foecunda est, sin minus, sterilis.

  29. 29.

    Ann Elis Hanson, ‘Aphorismi 5.28–63 and the Gynaecological Texts of the Corpus Hippocraticum’, in H. F. J. Horstmanshoff and M. Stol (eds), Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near-Eastern and Roman Medicine (Leiden, 2004).

  30. 30.

    W.H.S. Jones (ed.), Hippocrates (London, 1923), p. 175.

  31. 31.

    The Aphorisms were made available in Latin translations very early, and this treatise was ‘the best known and most widely disseminated’ of the Hippocratic collection. See Pearl Kibre, Hippocrates Latinus (New York, 1985), p. 29.

  32. 32.

    Hanson, Aphorismi 5.28–63, p. 304.

  33. 33.

    There are many different versions, cited by numerous authors, like Jerome or Erasmus: ‘A fat belly does not beget an excellent mind’ (Ingenium excellens non gignit venter obesus); ‘A fat belly does not beget a thin sense’ (Pinguis venter non gignit sensum tenuem).

  34. 34.

    Amor enim conciliat genituram. This sentence had become, by Castro’s time, a kind of cliché. Aëtius’ words were ‘ἡ γὰρ ἀγαπῶσα συναρμόζει τὴν γονὴν, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο αἱ μετ’ ἔρωτος μίξεις ταχυτεκνόταταί εἰσι’ (‘for love reconciles seed, and because of this, intercourse with desire is the one that most quickly produces children’).

  35. 35.

    See Pierre Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance (Paris, 1979); Raymond Stephanson, The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality 1650–1750 (Philadelphia, PA, 2004); Edward J. Behrend-Martinez, Unfit for Marriage: Impotent Spouses on Trial in the Basque Region of Spain 1650–1750 (Reno, NV, 2007).

  36. 36.

    caveat tamen ne decipiatur, quia uti diximus, hac in re multae fraudes saepissime commituntur, Part II, Book 3, Chapter 2, p. 365.

  37. 37.

    matrona proba, honesta, senior et exercitata.

  38. 38.

    Gianna Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases: The Observationes in Early Modern Medicine’, Early Science and Medicine, 15 (2010).

  39. 39.

    Qui generare nequeunt impotens dicuntur. Est autem impotentia duplex, naturalis et accidentalis, Part II, Book 3, scholium, p. 365.

  40. 40.

    On Cum frequenter, see Joseph Bajada, Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659) (Rome, 1988); Aidan McGrath, A Controversy Concerning Male Impotence (Rome, 1988).

  41. 41.

    See, for instance, ‘Because it does not always happen that a person who is cold to one is cold to another’ (quippe non semper sequitur frigidum uni esse frigidum alteri). Part II, Book 3, scholium, p. 365.

  42. 42.

    Hanson, ‘Hippocrates’, p. 583.

  43. 43.

    ‘quidem Hip[pocrates] […] lib. de nat. pueri, consuluit ancillae, quae dedecus verebatur, ut saltaret, quo foetum expelleret’.

  44. 44.

    idem circumspectissimus senex.

  45. 45.

    Heinrich von Staden, ‘“In a Pure and Holy Way”: Personal and Professional Conduct in the Hippocratic Oath?’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 51:4 (1996), p. 406.

  46. 46.

    nulli foeminae, quo partu abigat perdatve, medicamentum glandulamve suppositiciam dabo.

  47. 47.

    On abortion in ancient times, see John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman; Konstantinos Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World (London, 2002); Cristina Santos Pinheiro, Orbae matres: a dor da mãe pela perda de um filho na literatura latina (Lisbon, 2012), pp. 63–74.

  48. 48.

    Owsei Temkin, Soranus’ Gynecology (Baltimore, MD, 1991), p. 63.

  49. 49.

    Theodorus Priscianus lived around AD 400. His Euporiston was initially composed in Greek, but was translated into Latin. The Greek original was lost. In the third book, Priscianus explores women’s diseases. See Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine III: Roman Medicine (Omaha, NE, 1998), pp. 516–19. On the transmission of the Hippocratic oath and its interpretations, ancient and modern, as an absolute or as a selective prohibition of abortion, see Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World; M. J. Elsakkers, ‘Reading between the Lines: Old Germanic and Early Christian Views on Abortion’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Amsterdam, 2010.

  50. 50.

    Thomas Rutten, ‘Receptions of the Hippocratic Oath in the Renaissance: The Prohibition of Abortion as a Case Study in Reception’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 51 (1996).

  51. 51.

    In De universa mulierum medicina, mulierculae is often used to designate an old woman who acts as a procurer to younger girls. Usually, mulierculae are associated with ignorance and superstition. At the end of the scholium, Castro calls them sorceresses (veneficae), and ‘plagues that wander freely through the entire universe’ (pestes per uniuersum orbem liberrime vagantes).

  52. 52.

    Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, pp. 249–50.

  53. 53.

    Weinfried Schleiner, Medical Ethics in the Renaissance (Washington, DC, 1995), p. 50.

Research Resources

Primary Sources

  • Rodericus Castro, De universa mulierum medicina, 2 vols (Hamburg: Froben, 1603–4).

    Google Scholar 

  • Rodericus Castro, De universa mulierum medicina. Tertia editio auctior et emendatior (Hamburg: Froben, 1628).

    Google Scholar 

  • W.H.S. Jones (ed.), Hippocrates (London: Heinemann, 1923).

    Google Scholar 

  • R. Radicchi, La Gynaecia di Muscione: manuale per le ostetriche e le mamme del VI sec. d.C. (Pisa: Giardini, 1970).

    Google Scholar 

  • Owsei Temkin, Soranus’ gynecology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

Secondary Sources

  • Joseph Bajada, Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659) (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1988).

    Google Scholar 

  • Michael Boylan, ‘Galen’s Conception Theory’, Journal of the History of Biology, 19:1 (1986), 47–77.

    Google Scholar 

  • Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  • Lawrence Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter and Andrew Wear (eds), The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  • Pierre Darmon, Le tribunal de l’impuissance (Paris: Seuil, 1979).

    Google Scholar 

  • Lesley-Ann Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

    Google Scholar 

  • Marianne Elsakkers, ‘Reading between the Lines: Old Germanic and Early Christian Views on Abortion’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rebecca Flemming, ‘The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World: Medicine, Divinity and Gender’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87 (2013), 565–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

    Google Scholar 

  • Danielle Gourevitch, Le mal d’Être femme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984).

    Google Scholar 

  • Konstantinos Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World (London: Duckworth Academic, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  • Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  • Helen King, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

    Google Scholar 

  • Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

    Google Scholar 

  • Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Aidan McGrath, A Controversy Concerning Male Impotence (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1988).

    Google Scholar 

  • Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Katharine Park, ‘Cadden, Laqueur and the “One-Sex Body”’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 46:1 (2010), 96–100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cristina Santos Pinheiro, Orbae matres: a dor da mãe pela perda de um filho na literatura latina (Lisboa: FCT-Gulbenkian, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cristina Santos Pinheiro, ‘Suos utero quae necat (Am. 2.14.38): aborto, sexualidade e medicina no tempo de Ovidio’, in Cristina Pimental and Nuno Rodrigues (eds), Sociedade, poder e cultura no tempo de Ovidio (Lisbon, 2010), 173–186.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gianna Pomata, ‘Was there a “Querelle des femmes” in Early Modern Medicine?’, Arenal, 20:2 (2013), 313–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

    Google Scholar 

  • John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  • Winfried Schleiner, Medical Ethics in the Renaissance (Washington, DC, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  • Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Pre-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2011).

    Google Scholar 

  • Michael Stölberg, ‘A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Isis, 94 (2003), 274–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heinrich von Staden, ‘“In a Pure and Holy Way”: Personal and Professional Conduct in the Hippocratic Oath?’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 51:4 (1996), 404–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (eds), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present (London and New York, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

    Cristina Santos Pinheiro

  2. Centre for Classical Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Cristina Santos Pinheiro

Authors
  1. Cristina Santos Pinheiro
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Santos Pinheiro .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Gayle Davis

  2. Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Tracey Loughran

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Pinheiro, C.S. (2017). The Ancient Medical Sources in the Chapters about Sterility of Rodrigo de Castro’s De universa mulierum medicina. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_16

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_16

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52079-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52080-7

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation