In one popular sixteenth-century text, a physician asks bluntly, ‘Why are women more imprudent and foolish than men?’: Because women have much narrower and smaller pores than men, so they cannot evacuate vapours from their head. Moreover, women have wet and warm complexions. So that if they generate in their head very gross vapours and… swirling noxious gases that they cannot purge out of their head through their pores, there cannot be women who are prudent and wise, or only very rarely.8
