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It is now a well-established fact that women practised medicine in the ancient world. The medica or iatrine-the specifically female version of the physician, the medicus or iatros-as well as the obstetrix or maia-the midwife-along with a number of linguistic variants on these terms, all appear regularly in a range of literary, epigraphical and papyrological sources, as scholars have repeatedly observed. 1 How these appearances should be interpreted, on the other hand, remains more contentious. In particular, two alternative understandings of the figure of the medica or iatrine have emerged, and continue to be variously elaborated. For some she is the professional colleague of the male medicus or iatros, perhaps not his exact equal, but certainly operating on roughly the same terms, and illustrative, therefore, of a more inclusive, less sexually segregated, approach to the practice of medicine in antiquity than was to emerge in later times. 2 Others hold her to be synonymous, not with the medicus but the midwife, and so to illustrate a rather different historical principle: 'that women's health is women's business', and to demonstrate a clear sexual division of labour in the classical world rather than any blurring. 3 This is a discussion, moreover, that extends beyond medical practice into the literary field, into the formation of classical medical culture more broadly. For, not only are various recipes and remedies attributed to women contained within the extant pharmacological compilations of several male writers of the Roman empire, with female authored works cited in a similar context, but a set of Latin medical texts survives attached to the name of Cleopatra, and a single Greek manuscript preserves what it describes as extracts 'from the works of Metrodora'. 4 Again scholarly opinion is divided on the authenticity and significance of this material. Holt Parker is the most optimistic, assuming that, as a general rule, these female names represent real women who at least practised medicine, and often wrote about it too. 5 Others are more sceptical, particularly about the likelihood of female authorship. This scepticism is 257

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The article examines the understandings of, and responses to, reproductive failure in the classical Greek world. It discusses explanations and treatments for non-procreation in a range of ancient Greek medical texts, focusing on the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, which devote considerable energy to matters of fertility and generation, and places them alongside the availability of a divine approach to dealing with reproductive disruption, the possibility of asking various deities, including the specialist healing god Asclepius, for assistance in having children. Though the relations between these options are complex, they combine to produce a rich remedial array for those struggling with childlessness, the possibility that any impediment to procreation can be removed. Classical Greece, rather than the nineteenth century, or even 1978, is thus the time when "infertility," understood as an essentially reversible somatic state, was invented.

The Emperor -this world-soul -I saw riding through the city to review his troops. It is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such an individual who, here concentrated into a single point, reaches out over the world and dominates it. Hegel, 1806