One, Two, or Many Sexes: Sex Differentiation in Medieval Islamicate Medical Thought

Abstract

S i n c e t h e 1990 p u b l i c a t i o n of Thomas Laqueur’s book Making Sex, his proposed “one sex” model has served as the site of many spirited debates and discussions. Joan Cadden was one of the first to criticize Laqueur’s model in her book Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, in which she explained why her analysis differs from Laqueur’s: “Though there is much evidence in the present study that fits [Laqueur’s] ‘one-sex’ model, medieval views on the status of the uterus and the opinions of medieval physiognomers about male and female traits suggest evidence of . . . models not reducible to Laqueur’s.” More recently, Katharine Park has argued that there is no evidence to support the one-sex model for medieval Europe: “Before 1500 I could find no convincing expressions of the idea of genital homology at all, even as an alternative to be discarded, except for a few brief passages in the works of several late medieval surgeons, including Guy de Chauliac, who seems to have been one of the only medieval scholars to assimilate the full text of Galen’s On the Use of Parts.” While Galen’s views on the similarities between male and female organs may have received little attention in medieval European medical literature, they certainly were evident in Islamicate philosopher and physician Ibn Sinā’s (Avicenna’s) al-Qānūn fi al-.tibb (The canon of medicine), completed in 1025. Ahmad Dallal has argued that “the ancient idea of