The healing arts, religion, and magic have long been intertwined. We can see the legacy of herbal or “folk” medicine and the fascination that accompanies it in the media (not to mention in our email inboxes) and in the plethora of popular homeopathic remedies, herbals, and dietary supplements. Further, different cultural contexts reveal a dynamic dialogue between the ideologies behind “traditional” uses of herbs and regulated, FDA-approved drugs—a discourse which has long occupied the annals of medicine (and religion!) in one form or another. This is particularly true when the remedies at hand involve managing the sexual body. These negotiations of the sexual body extend into social, national, and international interests in addition to playing out in public policy and practices—and these present day negotiations can help shed a light on medieval negotiations of the sexual body; likewise, the medieval might also help us to reexamine our present day assumptions about our relationship to that body.
I provide two modern examples here that I hope will help be a touchstone to a deeper conversation about our anxieties around the sexual body—in particular to bodies that are “Other”; I also hope to show ongoing connections between our Western notions, practices, and anxieties, around the sexual body to those in the East--and our relationship to those notions. Though quite dated in the age of the Internet, the two examples I offer (and there are more where these came from—see a 2009 piece in “The Telegraph” on the alleged dropping of aphrodisiac gum on Gaza by Israel) are nonetheless useful when linking medieval and modern negotiations (and discourse) of the sexual body and its management through medicinal (and magical) remedies.
To wit, in the March 2005 Harvard Women’s Health Watch, one reader asks if natural herbal preparations in fact enlarge breasts, as advertised. The response from the editors to the question, not surprisingly, reminds readers that “natural” (non-prescription) breast enhancement products are not FDA approved. They describe the types of ingredients usually found in these products, including “phytoestrogens (plant-derived chemicals such as soy, flaxseed, red clover, alfalfa, and fennel), alleged aphrodisiacs (such as damiana or oat straw), and herbs traditionally used for women’s menstrual and reproductive complaints (including blessed thistle, motherwort, black cohosh, chaste-tree berry, and saw palmetto).” The bottom line for the Harvard Women’s Health Watch doctor is that if they work at all, they don’t work safely, and that “we’ll probably never know the truth” because of lack of “rigorous evaluation” (March 2005). We see yet another example of this dialogue—on the military level— in New Scientist, which reported that newly declassified documents originating from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, suggested developing “non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops.” Specifically, the proposal suggested the development of an aphrodisiac chemical weapon which “would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other…and would cause ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale” (2005). (This latter piece of news made its way into an episode of “30 Rock.”)
What these examples demonstrate is a web of power negotiations in which multiple cultural factions are at play. The Harvard Women’s Health Watch newsletter puts in high relief regulations and medicinal formation in negotiation—and often at odds—with unregulated practitioners and unregulated substances (not to mention a discourse around female breasts, sexuality, and the male gaze that falls outside the purview of this post). The example of the “non-lethal” chemical weapons designed to manage an enemy’s sexual desires, which speaks interestingly to our own culture’s homophobia, suggests ways in which certain institutions such as the government seek to disrupt its enemies through manipulating sexual desire and exploiting the social codes around that desire. I recount these articles not because I believe them inherently “medieval” (though you can read it how you wish). Rather, I want to illustrate both the cultural flexibility of medicinal and “magical” remedies and their ongoing significance as artifacts that reflect elements of a cultural practice and negotiation of religious ideology, national and individual identity, and social economy.
