“I was interested in the classical world from an early age; it was my parents’ fault for naming me ‘Helen’! What better escape for a shy and awkward only child than to wallow in books in which she was the beautiful and dangerous heroine? I devoured Roger Lancelyn Green’s novels on the Trojan War, and moved on to the rest of the Greek myths before branching out into Arthurian legends and beyond.”

“I remember asking the careers’ advisor at my school whether it was possible to take a degree in Mythology, but she said there was no such thing. Later, while I was flicking through University College London’s handbook, considering the merits of Anglo-Saxon, I found listed above it ‘Ancient History and Social Anthropology’. The options offered included ‘Anthropology of Myth’, which clinched the matter. After working in a book-shop for a year, I was off to study myth at last. My degree syllabus included the optimistically-named ‘Link Course’, which was supposed to link the theory and methods of history and anthropology; but, like everything else on the degree, it raised more problems than it solved! It was while working on a final year seminar for the Link Course that I read ancient medical texts for the first time. I was amazed that detailed material on symptoms and treatments survived in such profusion yet had not been mentioned in the ancient history syllabus. Ancient Greek gynaecology had suffered even more neglect than the rest of ancient medicine, because it was so utterly ‘wrong’ in terms of the medicine we now use. Yet it made sense in its time: why?”

“When I decided to apply to do postgraduate research, I originally called what I was doing ‘Ancient Greek concepts of time’; people I met expected clocks and calendars, but soon I realised that what I was doing was, in fact, looking at how the Greeks thought about the transition from girl to woman, and how they represented this in both myth and medicine. This was the early 1980s: it was still only just possible to say a word like ‘menstruation’ in a classics seminar! Even at that time, I was also interested in the later uses of classical medicine. Originally I started to look at sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century uses of the ancient texts because I wanted to escape from seeing them through the eyes of a woman living in the age of antibiotics, a woman who believes in the circulation of blood. Early modern medicine gave me a way to approach the ancient texts that reduced the temptation to diagnose an ancient disease description as ‘hormonal disturbance’ or ‘infection’; instead I could see how the body could have been interpreted before hormones or infection were understood.”