Clinical Gynecology and Aristotle’s Biology: The Composition of HA X

Although Aristotle was an avid researcher into the processes of sexual reproduction, many of his statements show that he had limited access to the bodies of women. For example, he failed to note that in women, unlike other female mammals, the urethra and vagina have separate orifices on the exterior of the body, and he believed that menstrual bleeding was akin to estrus and took place at the same time of the month in all women. It might seem that Aristotle simply did not avail himself of the knowledge available from physicians who attended women. However, the gathering of endoxa (professional opinions and empirical observations) before proceeding with his own theorizing on any subject was central to Aristotle’s methodology and it would be inconceivable that he would have failed to do this on the topic of women too. In the present paper, I wish to argue that the Aristotelian corpus, as it has been transmitted to us, contains in the first five chapters of Historia Animalium X (HA X) a treatise, On Failure to Reproduce (OFR), authored by a doctor, whom I shall call Ps-Aristotle, which formed part of Aristotle’s endoxa when developing his reproductive theories. I will argue that the final two chapters have been added as comments on OFR either by Aristotle himself or a later Peripatetic, and that it is the presence of these two chapters that has led to the work being