This is the first modern edition of Book X of the Historia Animalium. It argues that the first five chapters are a summary, from the hand of Aristotle, of a medical treatise by a physician practicing in the fourth-century BCE. This gives short shrift to Hippocratic staples such as trapped menses and the wandering womb, and describes a woman's climax during sex in terms that can be easily mapped onto modern accounts. In summarizing the treatise and examining its claims in the last two chapters, Aristotle follows the method described in the Topics for a philosopher embarking on a new field of study. Here we see Aristotle's ruminations over the conundrum of a woman's contribution to conception at an early stage in the development of his theory of reproduction. Far from being an insignificant pseudepigraphon, this is a central text for understanding the development of ancient gynaecology and Aristotelian methodology.

In this book Professor Dean-Jones gives a close analysis of theories concerning women's bodies in such authors as the Hippocratics and Aristotle. She demonstrates the centrality of menstruation in classical theories of female physiology, pathology, and reproduction, and suggests that this had both negative and positive repercussions in attitudes towards women's bodies in that society. In particular, she argues that many of the medical principles governing clinical practice on male patients derived from the observation that healthy women menstruate and women who are seriously ill tend not to. Many of the primary sources dealt with are not yet accessible in English, and to date research done on this material has appeared only in discrete articles, in several languages, and scattered in various publications. In addition to presenting many original theories, therefore, the book is important in assembling and presenting both original texts and the results of scholarly research on these texts in a way that is fully accessible to the non-specialist.