Abstract
According to the Hippocratic Corpus, there are two different ways of being barren when you are a woman : never getting pregnant or miscarrying. Most of the time, barrenness is mentionned in disease descriptions as a mere symptom among many others or as a predicted state. However, it sometimes comes first in a list of symptoms or appears to be the main point in a few aphorisms ; in addition, two groups of chapters (Diseases of Women I, c. 8-24 ; Nature of woman c. 35-46) and even a whole treatise (Barren Women) are focused on it. All these passages do not really match each other in explaining barenness, which seems to result from a disease and not to be a disease by itself. But the gathered chapters are indeed linked by a keen search of the causes, which relies itself on conception and generation theories. Barrenness has then to be considered as the result of an identifiable physical dysfunction and cannot be seen any more as a fatality.
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