Zee came into the studio today to talk with me about medieval medicine, and this time primarily

obstetrics and gynecology. We're talking about when things go wrong,

and we're talking about the absolutely wild theories that the medieval doctors had about why things happen the way they do.

And I thought you'd enjoy it,

so here's a small sample.

But what happens there is just this ends up being

sort of the text that kind of rides this

line between being a text and therefore something historians can actually look at

there's some vague references but not a lot to sort of the humoral approach.

It's mostly just practical applications. So it gives us this insight to this kind of like

hidden folk craft that's happening among women and that gives us kind of the best

we got into what's going on with women and women's health. But it's also strange you have to understand that it's strange because this

woman's writing it in Salerno which is a very strange medical place because it's the height of this turn.

She's treating a kind of a strange population that

wouldn't have looked a whole lot like the population that's happening in

northern France or England, which is our concern. However, that text ends up up there really fast,

so they are using it.

They are referencing it.

So yeah, just know that this is how this is going down.

Another thing that to understand with this is the place of women as

positions. It's not just women as patients in childbirth, but women as positions and

as people who treat other people, we kind of have to understand that obliquely through various

...