Outside of the medical treatises themselves, the existence of untrained individuals posing as doctors in ancient Greece is not attested before the fourth century b.c.e. I argue that their appearance in the fourth century is due in part to the early and widespread use of writing among the bona fide medical profession and that the success of some of these charlatans, however circumscribed or short-lived, contributed to the suspicion of medicine that arose among some in the ancient world. The ancient Greeks expected their iatroi – “physicians” – to have undergone extensive medical training with an experienced physician, and most iatroi did so because it was difficult to make a living as an iatros without such training. This is true notwithstanding the fact that many educated laymen took an interest in medical matters, that nonphysicians wrote and spoke on physiology and pathology, and that some individuals without medical training could pose as doctors and dupe patients for a greater or lesser period of time, circumstances that exist in our own culture.

In particular, my argument is the following:

1. Natural, empirical medicine was accepted as a technē, and iatroi were respected from the earliest times and not just in surgery. Natural medicine was mainstream in the fifth century.

2. The status of medicine increases in the fourth century to that of a technē par excellence, but at the same time criticism of medicine first appears in nonmedical texts.

3. This is due, in part, not to a greater failure rate among physicians because they were beginning to deal more widely with nonsurgical cases, but to the appearance of individuals who could pose as iatroi with some success without undergoing the traditional extensive training.

4. […]

It is axiomatic that virtually all the extant medical treatises of Graeco-Roman antiquity were written by men, but the extent of women's role in the compilation of these writings is debated. Paola Manuli believes the Hippocratics treated the female body as a dumb canvas on which to project their theories, while Aline Rousselle claims the Hippocratic treatises were little more than the written mouthpiece for the female oral tradition. Needless to say, most scholars believe the truth lies somewhere between the two. G.E.R. Lloyd has drawn attention to the interplay between developing scientific medicine and folk medicine, and Ann Ellis Hanson divides women into two types: the inexperienced, whose knowledge of her own body is indeed shaped by the physician, and the ‘woman of experience’, who functions as an authoritative source for male physicians. The very existence of this debate, however, indicates the recognition that for the ancient Greeks and Romans the epistemological basis of their gynaecology differs somehow from that on which the rest of their medicine is founded. Neither ancient authors nor modern scholars are so concerned to analyse the contribution of the male clientele to Hippocratic theories and treatment.

In practising clinical medicine the ancient physician recognized two sources of information: autopsia, his own observations, and historia, what he was told by other people. We might assume that it was the social impropriety of a doctor examining a woman's body in an intimate manner which caused a different emphasis in the epistemology of the gynaecology by restricting the opportunities ancient physicians had for autopsia in the case of women's diseases, but this is not acknowledged as a problem by the Hippocratics.