Galen on Women

Abstract This chapter first provides a summary of Galen’s understanding of the female body in health and sickness and of the ways in which he considered it to be both the same as and different from the paradigmatic male body in terms of physiology, anatomy, and disease. An overview of Galen’s therapeutic interactions with women follows, encompassing the gendering of his curative approach in general and his accounts of treating female patients in particular. The main aim is to try to put Galen’s theory and practice into dialogue, to explore how far he delivered on his emphatic commitment to an integrated vision of the medical art across its different parts.