Helen King (professor)

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Dr Helen King is professor of the History of Classical Medicine and head of the department of Classics at the University of Reading, England. Her first degree, at University College London, was in Ancient History and Social Anthropology; she then held research fellowships in Cambridge and Newcastle, taught in Liverpool for 8 years, and came to Reading on a Wellcome Trust University Award in 1996. She has been a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (2001), a Landsdowne Visiting Lecturer at the University of Victoria, British Columbia (2002), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin (2005). She is chair of the Wellcome grants panel, 'Research Resources in the History of Medicine'.

With the publication of her book Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (Routledge, 1998) Dr King established herself as the leading authority on the practice and theory of ancient medicine as relating to women and how it continues to influence thought to the present day.

Since completing her PhD on ancient Greek menstruation, Dr King has been interested in setting ancient medical thought within its social and cultural context, as one way - among others - of making sense of life. She has therefore looked at ancient ideas about creation, the role of women, and sacrifice to illuminate Hippocratic gynaecology. From teaching the history of medicine at Reading, she wrote a short introduction to the main issues, Greek and Roman Medicine (Bristol Classical Press, 2001). A volume of essays on Health in Antiquity was published under her editorship in March 2005 (Routledge).

She is particularly interested in the alleged (and imaginary) classical origins of female hysteria, on which she published Hysteria Beyond Freud (written with S. Gilman, R. Porter, G.S. Rousseau and E. Showalter, University of California Press, 1993), a section in History of Clinical Psychiatry (eds G. E. Berrios and R. Porter, Athlone Press, 1995), and 'Recovering hysteria from history: Herodotus and "the first case of shell shock"' in Peter Halligan et al. (eds), Contemporary Approaches to the Science of Hysteria: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Dr King has published on the myths of Tithonos, on mermaids (on which she has also done a lot of media work), and on the myth/fable of Agnodice, 'the first midwife'; she has investigated how this story was used to give authority to women in medical roles in various historical periods.