Queer failures of form in the Hippokratic case history of Phaethousa of Abdera (Epidemics VI 8.32)

Queer failures of form in the Hippokratic case history of Phaethousa of Abdera (Epidemics VI 8.32)

The theoretical and cultural underpinnings of Hippokratic case histories are well-acknowledged (see King 1998: 54-58), yet, as a genre, they remain a lightning rod for presentist projections about the objectivity and coherence of western medical writing. For some, Hippokratic case histories signal “the invention of medicine,” or even of literary Greek prose (see Lane Fox 2020). This is in many ways an over-corrective to the relative neglect of ancient Greek medical works, texts “once deemed degenerate or unavailable to literary analysis” (Holmes 2016: 20). The same qualities of the case histories that formerly seemed rudimentary, in this view, instead bear a seal of calculated authority; for example, the use of numbered days or “critical days” as an organizing device for the successive stages of an illness (Lane Fox 2020: 219–220).

This paper focuses on an infamous Hippokratic case history that does not use critical days: that of Phaethousa of Abdera (Epidemics 6.8.32). Phaethousa, a “stay-at-home” (οἰκουρός) wife who had borne children (ἐπίτοκος), experiences the cessation of her period following the exile of her husband, causing her body to “become masculinized” (ἠνδρώθη). Despite doctors’ best efforts, Phaethousa dies—which, we are told, also happened to Nanno of Thasos. While this passage is considered exemplary, particularly for scholars of gender and medicine, it diverges from several predominant formal conventions that govern other case histories in the Epidemics. Beyond the absence of critical days, the passage lacks a first-person singular authorial presence (see Holmes 2013) as well as direct observations about the patient(s). It features a nested case history, that of Nanno. This passage also closes the final section of Epidemics 6, and stresses twice the aporia of doctors who have discussed the case.

Rather than foregrounding this aporia, many scholarly readings of Epidemics 6.8.32 seek to demonstrate that Phaethousa’s story is consistent with Hippokratic gynecological theories (e.g. King 2013a, 2013b: Part 2, 2015; Holmes 2012: Ch.1). These readings have worthy aims: namely, countering Thomas Laqueur’s still-influential argument for a premodern “one-sex body.” Yet, in arguing that Phaethousa’s transformation is not an instance of sex change, an intersex condition, or even an instance of gender ambiguity, scholars accept the author’s framing of Phaethousa and Nanno as diseased women, pigeonholing them as a “wholly feminine” in “identity” and “behavior” (King 2013: 139).

My paper analyzes the formal idiosyncrasies of Epidemics 6.8.32 to problematize the assumed coherence of case histories more generally, while arguing for the legitimacy of their queer unhistoricist interpretation (e.g. Rengel 2019). To do so, I draw from recent methodologies for offering trans, nonbinary, and intersex readings of classical literature and archaeological material (e.g. Power 2020, Watson 2021). Such readings will not recover Phaethousa and Nanno’s lives or autonomy, nor recuperate them as ideal queer objects. But if form is not only “something to resist and transgress,” then we can accept queer experiences to be necessarily “enmeshed within—and indeed, activated and enabled by—the structures of aesthetic form, social inequality, and conceptual categorization” (Amin, Musser, and Pérez 2017: 228).