Laura Efron

Gender and Sexuality in Antiquity

The Role of Love in Ancient Greek Medicine

Among the many Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece, one that was worshipped on multiple levels and to a great extent was Love. This divine force held a powerful role in many aspects of the Greeks’ lives, including the understanding of their own bodies. As the society’s culture moved away from reliance on the Divine, and towards a more scientific method of understanding itself, the notion of love remained ingrained in the set assumptions; its dual ability to cure and destroy underscored the practices of medicine and the understandings of human anatomy.

For the ancient Greek doctor and philosopher, Eryximachus, Love’s potential for health and destruction were rooted in its divine origins. Good love “stems from the Muse Celestia” and “Common Love,” from “Polymnia” (Symposium 22). He saw these two loves as at the center of human/divine communication: “all the ways in which gods and men communicate with one another—are solely concerned with the perpetuation or the cure of love” (Symposium 23). Love provided the link, then, between the mortal and immortal beings. It was a common project that both humans and gods could work on. Eryximachus further articulated, “It is (Love) who makes it possible for us to interact on good terms with one another and with our divine masters” (Symposium 23-4). It is the element of life that transcends the human realm, giving the people a taste of the divine in their own lives.

With Love bridging the mortal and immortal worlds, it is not surprising that the ancient Greeks’ first attempts at medical practice, a step towards self-reliance and independence from the gods, revolved around Love. Love, in fact, was the core of their understanding of the physical world. Eryximachus states: “The body of every creature on earth is pervaded by Love, as every plant is too; it’s hardly going too far to say that Love is present in everything that exists” (Symposium 20). The Greeks saw Love as the substance of all matter, and therefore, at the center of their own living bodies, making Eryximachus’ statement, “The science of medicine is completely governed by Love” (Symposium 21), a sharp intuition. With this observation at the core of their medicinal understandings, the ancient Greeks’ doctors’ approach to healing was through the means of manipulating the force of Love.

The intricacies of the doctors’ love-manipulating methods were interwoven with the duality notion of love. With Love’s power to heal or destroy, the doctors needed to push the love into the healing realm, and learn how to shift it away from its destructive tendencies. A major way they practiced this was by “reconciling extremes of hostility between the bodily elements, and (of) making them love one another” (Symposium 21). The balancing of hot and cold, sweet and bitter, and wet and dry appears a number of times in many different treatments. To cure hysterical suffocation in a woman, the doctor “washes her thoroughly with hot water” and uses “sweet-scented fumigations beneath her vagina, but foul-scented ones at her nose” (Medicine and Anatomy 345). If the woman’s womb is displaced, she is washed with hot water, and a variety of sweet, and not so sweet, pessaries are applied to her, ranging from “cow dung” and “beef bile” to “Myrrh” and “half-cooked honey” (Medicine and Anatomy 344). They even believed that the woman’s menstrual cycle was caused by “a great difference in temperature between month and month” (The Nature of the Child 327). These opposing qualities, hot, cold, dry and wet, were seen as “under the influence of the moderate Love,” and could be shifted around to blend into a harmony, or a “temperate climate” (Symposium 23). The doctors had to turn these factors over to the Good Love’s control, otherwise the “brutal one gains control over the weather, then (they) cause(s) widespread destruction and harm” (Symposium 23). The doctor’s job was not to create or destroy anything in order to cure, but merely to rearrange the ever present and powerful force of Love.

The doctors used Love on an even larger scale than this, though. Yes, Love governed these specific elements that could be blended in different ways to produce harmony, but Love, or rather, sex, was used as a literal cure for many women’s ailments as well. Even their understanding of the body revolved around the sexual organs. “Problems with the female sexual organs were thought to affect the women’s organism as a whole” (Medicine and Anatomy 343) and the doctors believed “the womb (was) responsible for all (such) diseases” (Medicine and Anatomy 344). This preoccupation with the woman’s sexual body parts shows that Love and sex were at the center of their medical practices. Whenever a woman was sick, the doctor blamed it on the displacement of the womb (Medicine and Anatomy 344). Incredible measures were taken to “heal by bringing on menstruation”(Medicine and Anatomy 344), and if this did not cure the problem, she was directed “to have intercourse with her husband” (Medicine and Anatomy 349, 346).

Having intercourse caused different reactions in the men and women, however. Men and women were partially defined by their differences in the previously mentioned elements; “the cause of male and female is heat and cold” where “male animals are hotter than female ones” (Medicine and Anatomy 339). Since women are colder, intercourse with a man, who is hotter, makes them more balanced. In intercourse “the vagina is rubbed and the womb is disturbed, an irritation is set up in the womb which produces pleasure and heat in the rest of the body” (The Seed 319). The actual act of intercourse is a balancing of these two extremes. The man, however, is burdened by intercourse with women. Even having erotic dreams is a precursor of insanity for a man (The Seed 318). This dramatic difference in the effect of love on the different genders demonstrates Eryximachus’ Celestial and Common Love. Here, the love experienced by the woman is Celestial, and she is healed, while the love experienced by the man is Common, and he is harmed. The difference probably stems from their deeply rooted gender associations, where the love towards a man is more highly regarded than the love towards a woman. He is able to share something useful and healing with the woman, whereas she just sucks the health right out of him.

The woman, however, was seen to benefit from even more than the intercourse. The pregnancy that resulted from intercourse was also viewed as an asset to the women’s health (Medicine and Anatomy 346). Becoming pregnant stabilizes the womb, which immediately cures the problem of womb dislocation, and thus cures most of the woman’s ailments (Medicine and Anatomy 346). The woman’s erratic period stops flowing, and becomes more stabilized by the pregnancy as it “flows gently into the womb in small amounts each day without causing discomfort” (The Nature of the Child 327). This storage of blood is seen to heat, and help balance, the entire body; “the womb is heated by the blood which lingers in it and in turn heats the rest of the body” (The Nature of the Child 327). Pregnancy, to the ancient Greeks, was seen as a stabilized state of being, one that locked the force of Love into its beneficial role, keeping all the dual elements in harmony.

The ancient Greeks were clearly moving away from a Divine based society since they began to practice medicine, but it is also obvious that their worldview remained influenced by the powers of the Divine; namely Love. Their understanding of the human body was based on the elements governed by Love, the bitter and sweet, hot and cold. Their explanations for gender difference came down to Love’s duality, too. Even the Greek’s cures revolved around Love in some form, whether it was to shift the elements around and create harmony, or to advise women to sleep with their husbands.

While it is easy to stand back and scorn the subjectivity of the ancient Greeks’ medical practices and laugh at their notions of human anatomy, it is important to recognize that all “science” has a degree of cultural influence. It is true that their sweet and sour pessaries, cures of sex, and anatomical understanding that was based on “Love” would be ridiculous in the modern western society, but rather than view their methods as “bad science,” we can use them as a rich source for discovering cultural values. Love was at the center of their science of healing, and this shows us that it was not an isolated phenomenon in Greek society, but enveloped all aspects of life – spiritual, emotional and physical.