Interpretations of the Healer's Touch in the Hippocratic Corpus

This paper analyses gender as an aspect of the role of touch in the relationship between doctors and patients, as represented in the Hippocratic Corpus. Touch is an essential aspect of the ancient doctor's art, but one potentially fraught with concerns over gender: while seeing, hearing, and smelling are also central to the medical encounter, touching is the act that places the greatest demands on the privacy and bodily integrity of the patient. This paper shows--perhaps counterintuitively--that, despite the multiple assertions of gender differences put forward by the authors of the Hippocratic Corpus, these authors make little distinction between touching male and female patients. At the same time, the paper argues that ancient physicians were anxious to avoid the charge that they were harming their patients when they touched them. It demonstrates that male doctors, sensitive as they were to the problems posed by their interactions with female patients, were challenged in different ways when engaging in intimate contact with male patients.