Sex Time: Relatedness and the Sexed Body in Medieval Islamic Medicine

Time and temporality were crucial for medieval Islamic physicians' understanding of sex and gender. In their view, male bodies developed faster in utero, reached puberty, and aged faster. Female bodies were slower in growth, digestion, and in reaching orgasm. Moreover, female bodies were seen through the lens of menstrual cycles, periods of fertility, pregnancy, and breastfeeding. This talk is a chapter of a new book that focuses on time and temporality in medieval Islamic clinical culture. This chapter investigates the making of the gendered body in medical thought and practice as a body drawn on a particular temporality marked by belatedness and variance. It examines how sex and gender, as temporal categories, affected medical practice and disease management.

Ahmed Ragab is a historian, physician and a documentary filmmaker. He is associate professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the founding director of the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. He is co-editor of Osiris (journal of the History of Science Society) and editor of Johns Hopkins UP book series: Global Histories of Medicine, Science, Race and Colonialism. He is the author of The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion and Charity (Cambridge UP, 2015), Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam (Routledge, 2018), and Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh (Routledge, 2019). He’s currently working on a book titled Around the Clock: Time in Medieval Islamic Clinical Culture (under contract with Johns Hopkins UP).