Predicting and Choosing Baby’s Gender in the Hippocratic Corpus

Abstract

 - Many various Hippocratic treatises, as Epidemics, Aphorisms, Barren Women, Superfetation  and Generation, deal with baby’s gender. According to them, there are a few ways to know if a pregnant woman is waiting for a boy or a girl. It is even possible to decide having a boy or a girl by giving drugs to woman or controlling man’s body. Those predictions and technics rely upon opposite theories about generation (like the ones of Generation  and Regimen ) and enable us to explain how, in the Hippocratic Corpus, the particularities of female and male body take part in genetics.    - Key words: Hippocratic Corpus - Generation - Gender