The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World: Medicine, Divinity, and Gender

By Rebecca Flemming

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 87, No. 4 (2013)

Introduction: 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.

Introduction: Infertility has had a rapidly rising scholarly profile, across a host of fields and disciplines, since the 1980s. The explosion in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) may be the main force behind this rise, but the debates have moved well beyond the technologies, just as the technologies have moved well beyond infertility. Historically, however, the topic remains underdeveloped, if not actually stunted and misshapen. Indeed, there are those who would deny that infertility has much of a past at all. Thus, in their contribution to an excellent recent collection of essays aiming, precisely, to broaden and deepen, discussion of reproductive failure around the world, Margarete Sandelowski and Sheryl de Lacey claim that “infertility was ‘invented’ with the in vitro conception and birth in 1978 of Baby Louise.” The argument is not, of course, that there had been no procreative problems, or involuntary childlessness, before 1978, but that the new technological developments that came to fruition that year were, and are, a real game changer. “In-fertility” thus has a prehistory: it was, they say, preceded by barrenness and sterility, “used to connote a divine curse of biblical proportions” and “an absolutely irreversible physical condition,” respectively. Whereas “infertility” itself signifies a “medically and socially liminal state in which affected persons hover between reproductive incapacity and capacity,” which emerged when “both infertile couples and their physicians began to expect that virtually any kind of biological or physical impediment to reproduction could eventually be bypassed, even if not removed or cured.”

Click here to read this article from John Hopkins University

Sponsored Content