The people of Abdera were notorious in Antiquity for their lack of political organization as well as for their ignorance and foolishness. In the epistolary novel transmitted within the Hippocratic Corpus (Epist. 10-17), this picture of the Abderites emerges from the role they played in the encounter between Hippocrates and Democritus, who represent respectively Science and Philosophy.
The fifth book of the Hippocratic Aphorisms represents an important source for the history of ancient gynecology: exactly the half of this book (thirty-six of its seventy-two aphorisms) is concerned with gynecological problems. Some aphorisms (especially Aph. V 59, 62 and 63) deal with obstacles to pregnancy and sterility of women and/or men. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Galen understood and explained these aphorisms, whose interpretation covers a very long section of his Commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms.
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