Immaculate Forms - Uncovering the History of Women's Bodies

Helen King is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at The Open University. She is a historian of medicine and the body, and has held visiting posts at Gustavus Adolphus College, MN; the Peninsula Medical School; and the universities of Vienna, Texas, Notre Dame and British Columbia. She is also an elected member of the General Synod of the Church of England, where she is vice-chair of the Gender & Sexuality Group. Since her first monograph, Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the female body in ancient Greece (1988), she has published on aspects of gynaecology and obstetrics from classical Greece to the nineteenth century. Among her other books are Hippocrates Now (Bloomsbury 2019), The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Ashgate, 2013); Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe (with Manfred Horstmanshoff and Claus Zittel, Brill, 2012); Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology (Ashgate, 2007) and The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty (Routledge, 2004), as well as a short introductory book, Greek and Roman Medicine (Bloomsbury, 2001).