* Since the odds of our meeting at a cocktail party are slim and the odds of my managing to swing the conversation around to speculums slimmer still, let me take this opportunity to share: The earliest speculum dates from Hippocrates’ day and was a rectal model. It was to be another five hundred years before the vaginal speculum made its debut. Dr. Grigg theorizes that this was because, in the Arabian model of medicine followed at the time, women could be examined only by women, and there were very few women doctors to do the examining. This implies that most women in Hippocrates’ day never went to the gyno. Given that the Hippocratic gynecological cabinet included cow-dung pessaries and fumigation materials “of heavy and foul smell”—not to mention rectal speculums—they were probably better off.