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  While living on Lesbos, Aristotle had made sure to include hyenas in his animal studies. His great interest in the animal had been piqued by the rumour that ‘every hyena is furnished with the organ both of the male and the female’ – that they were hermaphrodites. Today, the reason for the rumour is plain: the female hyena has a clitoris so grossly enlarged that it looks, to the casual observer, much like a penis, especially when the clitoris is fully erect, when it can protrude to seven inches. Spotted hyenas are, in fact, the only female mammals that urinate, mate, and give birth through the tip of a clitoris. (Keep in mind that the hyenas give birth to infants that weigh between 1 and 1.5 kilograms – and sometimes to two infants at once.) The female hyena lacks an external vagina; in place of the labia majora, the fleshy folds that normally flank the vagina, it has a fused sac of skin, something like a scrotum. If you were to look inside the female’s ‘penis’, however, you would find a urinary and genital system far more typical of any other female mammal.

  Aristotle studied his hyenas carefully. His were not the spotted variety, but striped, as were found throughout the Mediterranean region of his day. And like their spotted cousins, male and female striped hyenas look remarkably similar. Both have manes that are erected when the animal is threatened – manes so large that Aristotle described them as running ‘all along the spine’. The females had the same enlarged, penis-like clitoris as the spotted hyena, and the males appeared to have a large opening near the anus, looking much like a vagina. When it came time to dissect the specimens of hyena that he had collected, Aristotle soon realized that the rumour that the animals were hermaphrodites was untrue. In addition to noting the differences between the clitoris in the female and the penis in the male, he identified the opening in the male’s anus as a sweat gland. By virtue of its position, this structure, he explained, could easily be confused with a vagina. Behind the opening, however, he did not observe any plumbing that might allow it to be used as a passage through which fertilization might happen.

  It was an obvious case, in Aristotle’s view, of mistaken identity, the external appearances hiding the significant differences in what was going on inside the animals’ bodies. And so these dissections reinforced in him the belief that the male and the female must play very different roles in reproduction. Why else would they have such very different reproductive organs? The more important question was: what exactly was the difference between the male and the female role in reproduction?

  One of the influential philosophies at the time was atomism, the idea that everything in the world is comprised of very small, indivisible, fundamental units – the intellectual birth of the atom. In terms of making babies, atomism was interpreted to mean that the male and female bodily fluids contained a miniature, perfectly formed version of the adult body of the respective sex, broken into parts, down to a pair of little arms and little legs, a compact torso, and a tiny head. When the male and female fluids mixed together during sex, these small parts simply assembled into a small body, which grew larger once it was sown in the fertile ground of a woman’s body – the foetus. Conveniently, atomism explained how a child could resemble both mother and father, which made the concept quite popular among classical thinkers.

  Aristotle did not agree with this atomistic view of the world. This was not, after all, what he saw happening in his experiments with birds. He had observed that hens would mate with more than one rooster. Yet, ‘even when the hen is trodden by two males the offspring does not have two such parts, one from each male’ – the only logical reproductive outcome, if you held to atomism. If the male bird supplied a miniature body part to each female with which it had sex, ‘the offspring should have had a double portion’, Aristotle argued, ‘but it does not’. When it came to chickens and other birds, this meant the ‘male supplies nothing material’. Likewise, of course, a woman who conceives after having sex with two men does not normally have a two-headed, four-limbed baby as a result. She isn’t even very likely to have two babies, unless she happened to have twins. These were facts of life that Aristotle could also observe.

  In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle put forward an improvement in the reasoning for why there was a sexual division in reproduction, one that had nothing to do with the male and the female both providing the offspring’s parts. In his scientific opinion, there were always two sexes in a species, because the male contributes the form and the female contributes the matter, the physical stuff of which the child would be made, or sculpted from. Form was superior to material. The male semen dictated the shape of the child, like a chisel gives a statue its shape, without itself becoming part of the product – the master artist at work. Since fathers created not just sons in their own image but daughters, too, daughters must, Aristotle believed, arise when the father’s semen was weak. If the mother’s reproductive fluid – her menstrual blood, in the philosopher’s accounting – was also weak and could not be mastered by the semen, then you got neither a perfectly formed son nor a materially inferior daughter, but a monstrosity.

  Aristotle’s hypothesis may have been flawed, but it is not surprising that he did not consider a more accurate version of the inner workings of the female form – one was not available. Though Aristotle discussed the uterus in his book, very little had been revealed about the female reproductive organs at the time he wrote On the Generation of Animals.

  The ovaries, referred to as ‘female testicles’, probably were discovered by an anatomist, Herophilos, who performed both animal and human dissections, some of them for public viewing, from his base in Alexandria, Egypt. But Herophilos was reportedly born in 335 BCE, just thirteen years before Aristotle’s death. Soranus, a physician from an area of what is now Turkey, appears to have dissected human subjects as part of his investigation into obstetrics and women’s diseases. He displayed a clear understanding of the various sections of the uterus, placenta, bladder, and vagina, which he described in great anatomical detail. Soranus’s dissections, however, were conducted in the second century BCE – also well after Aristotle’s time. For more than a millennium afterwards, little advance was made in understanding the true nature and function of these mysterious female parts, because in large part, human dissections were widely proscribed, which meant that cadavers were not openly available for this sort of poking and probing. Instead, physicians had to rely on the writings of Aelius Galen, the second-century Greek surgeon considered to be the most influential medical writer in all history.

  Galen was born in Pergamon, the great cultural centre of Asia Minor under Roman rule. He came from a family of wealth and education, and he followed suit, training in philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences. He had probably been influenced by his father in his choice of a career in medicine. The story goes that the Greek god of healing, Asclepius himself, appeared to Galen’s father in a dream to offer vocational guidance intended for his son. After this god-given training as a physician, Galen visited Alexandria, where the doctors placed great emphasis on the study of anatomy. On his return home, he was appointed physician to the gladiatorial games. This gave him the dubious privilege of regularly confronting the horrendous injuries inflicted in the arena. As ghastly as the job may have been, operating on the wounds allowed him to gain first-hand experience of human anatomy. He supplemented his observations of battered gladiators with dissections of abandoned corpses.

  Galen lived some five hundred years after Aristotle, and medical knowledge had evolved. So he decided to develop his own theory of sex differences, based on his own work. In contrast to Aristotle’s belief that the sperm was simply the seed that laid out the final form of the foetus, Galen thought the foetus’s development was not just influenced but powered by the sperm, and that the female was actually a male in reverse. He was notably inspired by Herophilos, whose teachings were still popular in Alexandria and from whom he adopted the idea that a woman’s ovaries were essentially testes. But Galen went further, positing that the female genitalia are identical to those of the mal
e, only turned inward. According to this ‘reversal’ theory, the uterus was an inverted scrotum. This of course did not explain the function of those female parts that males lack – for example, more developed breasts. And the uterus did not serve the same purpose as the scrotum, a fact of biology that would have been understood even in Galen’s day. But Galen was silent on these reproductive discrepancies.

  When compared with modern views of reproductive evolution, though, Galen’s reversal theory does not seem to have got everything wrong. For instance, in his essay ‘Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples’, the renowned evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the man’s body is not a basic structure from which a woman’s diverged:

  Males and females are not separate entities, shaped independently by natural selection. Both sexes are variants upon a single ground plan… Male mammals have nipples because females need them – and the embryonic pathway to their development builds precursors in all mammalian foetuses, enlarging the breasts later in females but leaving them small (and without evident function) in males.

  Likewise, Gould imagined that the clitoris and the penis were ‘one and the same organ’, their size determined by the relative balance of hormones, particularly testosterone, during foetal development. The same could be said of women’s labia majora and men’s scrotal sacs, though with these organs the presence of testosterone triggered a folding and fusing of the skin in the males. Gould took his argument a further step into controversy by stating that the clitoris was something like the appendix, an evolutionary artefact that no longer served a purpose. But on a more basic level, he supposed ‘the external differences between male and female develop gradually’, so much so that, ‘from an early embryo so generalized that its sex cannot be easily determined’.

  Since the early 1950s, when DNA was discovered to be the elusive matter that allows us to inherit traits from our parents, an incredible amount of scientific progress has been made. The complete genetic make-up, or genome, has now been mapped, or ‘sequenced’ in the jargon, for nearly two hundred organisms, including various kinds of bacteria and yeasts, honey bees, malarial mosquitoes, flies, worms, mice, rats, puffer fish, chickens, dogs, chimpanzees, and, of course, humans; our first draft of our genome was revealed in 2000, with the complete code cracked in 2003. This sequencing has provided a library of essential biological information. In addition, the various genome sequencing projects have determined that humans have around twenty-five thousand genes, divulged what some of these genes do, and confirmed chimpanzees as our closest kindred species.

  DNA tells our cells what to do and when to do it. You can think of it as the genetic equivalent of an instruction manual for flat-packed furniture. It gets read, and the information it gives is translated into building a new piece of kit. The section of DNA that when read translates into the production of a certain chemical is a gene. Most genes are translated into a series of amino acids, and amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins, in turn, are the main constituents of cells, which collect into tissues, which themselves collect into organs.

  Genes are made up of what are called nucleotides, which are molecules made up of sugars, phosphates, and chemical bases (referred to by the first letters, A, T, C, and G, of their chemical names). DNA is a long chain of these units of nucleotides, each built on one of the four bases. Geneticists refer to the chain by the sequence of individual bases of the nucleotides as they appear (for example, GATTACA, which is where the 1997 science-fiction film got its name). Not all sequences of letters ‘spell out’ genes; many just regulate genes, others seem to do nothing at all. Usually two chains of nucleotides wrap around each other – this is what gives DNA the double helix, or twisted ladder, look. These long strands of DNA double helices wind round in tight coils to form the chromosomes. Normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes, wound in two pairs of twenty-three.

  Unlike Gould, Galen did not have the benefit of witnessing the minutiae of how human embryos develop, let alone knowledge of hormones or of DNA and chromosomes. So though the reversal theory might sound something like modern biology, Galen married his theory to assumptions about an unequal division of labour in the work of reproduction, assumptions that reflect the prejudices of the day. For example, among the ancient Greeks, another of the great differentiators between men and women was temperature. Around the fifth century BCE, a doctrine of health had formulated based on the balance in the body of heat and cold, dryness and moistness. It was widely believed that illness would erupt if one of these qualities dominated over another. Galen, like Aristotle before him, thought that women inherently had a different balance of heat and cold than did men. He started with the principle that women were colder, a state that influenced their behaviour and contributed to an inferior physiology and limited reproductive power. He even compiled an ‘empirical’ work on bodily heat, called De Temperamentis. And it was empirical: he had drawn his conclusions from experiments in which he had touched a range of different people – the old, youths, children, and infants – in order to uncover who were more and who were less hot. Throughout his report, Galen used the word andres, meaning ‘men’, to describe the participants in his trials, rather than anthropoi, meaning ‘people’. That may be a distinction lost in translation, but it seems to indicate that the storied physician did not actually include any female subjects in an experiment from which he made the following judgements as to the nature of women:

  Within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the reason for the perfection is his excess of heat, for heat is Nature’s primary instrument. Hence in those animals that have less of it, her workmanship is necessarily more imperfect, and so it is no wonder that the female is less perfect than the male by as much as she is colder than he.

  Though Galen did most certainly ponder, investigate, and experiment, there is no suggestion in any of his written accounts that his trials were ever conducted using women at all.

  To Galen, the female of the species was not just inverted, she was incomplete, a view not substantially different from Aristotle’s ‘materially inferior’ daughter. Consider Galen’s analysis of the ‘female testes’. As incomplete male testes, the ovaries should be expected to produce semen. But this ‘female semen’ would not be as pure, or as hot, as the male’s, according to Galen. The ovaries, therefore, performed a function equivalent to the testes, but not as well. And he went ‘one up’ on Aristotle when he chose to refer to women as arrostos, a term most often used to mean a state of disease or morbid weakness. Unfinished, inverted, and in a state of morbid weakness – that’s what women were made of.

  The question was, if it was male semen that made babies, what did it contain that could hold such great life-granting power?

  At the time that Catherine de Medici was struggling to become pregnant, in the 1530s, most physicians still clung to such classical ideas of reproduction, by then more than two millennia old. And assumptions about the incredible potency of sperm animated the plans of the scientist later known as Paracelsus, who was studying medicine near Catherine’s home city of Florence around the time of her birth.

  Philippus Bombastus von Hohenheim – who styled himself as ‘greater’ than the Roman physician Celsus – spent much of his life formulating a recipe for the creation of human life. His recipe involved hermetically sealing a man’s semen in a glass tube, burying the tube in horse manure for forty days, removing it, and then magnetizing it. Paracelsus believed that the entombed semen would begin to live and move, until it assembled into a miniature yet transparent human form, a homunculus, akin to the atomistic foetus imagined centuries earlier by the Greeks. After being unearthed, the homunculus was to be fed daily with arcanum sanguinis hominis – human blood – and constantly kept at the temperature of a mare’s womb for a further forty weeks. From this protocol would emerge a human child, as normal as any child born of a woman, except perhaps a bit smaller.

  In his own right, Paracelsus was a brilliant scientist, who made substanti
al and prescient contributions to the practice of medicine. Still, even in the sixteenth century, growing a baby in a bottle was mad-cap. So why did he think it plausible? By this time, many other notable scientists – from Galen of Pergamum to Leonardo da Vinci – had performed vivid experiments, including human dissections, to expose human anatomy. But many of Paracelsus’s generation still found it incredibly difficult to cut the cord connecting their thinking to those of their forebears from the great intellectual centres of Greece. Though Paracelsus opposed many of the doctrines of the ancients, he espoused a definition of parenthood that would not be out of place in Aeschylus or Aristotle:

  The whole of the man’s body is potentially contained in the semen, and the whole of the body of the mother is the soil in which the future man is made to ripen… [Woman] nourishes, develops and matures the seed without furnishing any seed herself. Man, although born of woman, is never derived from woman, but always from man.

  Thus, horse manure stands in for the ‘soil’ of the womb, and a child is born.

  Further, if a man’s semen was believed to contain everything needed to create a mini-human, then any failure to become pregnant must be due to a fault in the incubation system – the woman or the horse manure, as the case may be. While Catherine de Medici applied scores of vile potions and lotions to her body in hopes of fertilizing the ground, Henry simply vouched for his virility by claiming that he had made another woman pregnant while away on one of his campaigns. To prove it, he went so far as to claim as a legitimate heir the baby girl of a woman who, according to some accounts, he had once raped (or at any rate, he had sex with on only one occasion). Catherine might as well have been born in ancient Greece, when women were not believed to be necessary for the production of children at all. Henry’s omnipotent semen should have been more than enough. (She and Henry finally succeeded in their efforts a decade later, and went on to have ten children.)