https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/963 Publications de Auteurs Helen King fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1168 This paper offers a close reading of the ancient Greek and Roman texts which Rachel Maines (The Technology of Orgasm, 1999) used as evidence for therapeutic masturbation in the ancient world, and thus presented as precursors for the vibrator. Examining the evidence of the Hippocratic corpus, Celsus, Soranus and Galen, it shows that the lines of transmission between the ancient sources, and in their later reception, are far more complex than her work suggests, and thus challenges her claims for the normality of massage to orgasm in Western medicine. While Maines herself has subsequently insisted that she proposed a ‘hypothesis’ rather than a ‘fact’, in the popular reception of her book this distinction has been almost entirely overlooked, leading to an obscuring of female agency – both as patients, and as healers. lun., 20 juin 2022 11:28:24 +0200 jeu., 12 oct. 2023 14:34:02 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1168 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/957 The paper investigates the implications, for a ‘one-sex’ model of the body, of the Hippocratic case history in which a woman ceases to menstruate and then grows a beard after her husband leaves. This story challenges a model of sexual difference based solely on the gonads, drawing attention to other visible or audible markers, and to the hierarchical relationships between them. The long history of reception of this story, telling it in a variety of contexts ranging from ‘sex change’ stories to lovesickness to accounts of prolapse, and setting it beside other stories from outside the ancient medical tradition, shows both its flexibility and the importance of having a Hippocratic seal of authority. Two gendered Greek terms in the story, οἰκουρός (oikouros) and ἐπίτοκος (epitokos), emphasise Phaethousa’s femininity and demonstrate that, far from being intermediate between two sexes, she remains female throughout her illness. mar., 14 juin 2022 14:21:09 +0200 jeu., 16 mars 2023 08:42:54 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/957