Agnodice
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Agnodice or Agnodike (Gr. Ἀγνοδίκη) was the earliest historical midwife mentioned among the ancient Greeks.[1] She was a native of Athens, where it was forbidden by law for women or slaves to study medicine. According, however, to Hyginus,[2] on whose authority alone the whole story rests, Agnodice disguised herself in men's clothing, and attended the lectures of a physician named Hierophilus, devoting herself chiefly to the study of midwifery and gynaecology.
Women initially refused her service until she confessed to them that she was a woman. Afterwards, when she began practice, being very successful, she excited the jealousy of several of the other practitioners, by whom she was summoned before the Areopagus, and accused of corrupting the morals of her patients. Upon her refuting this charge by making known her sex, she was immediately accused of having violated the existing law, which second danger she escaped by the wives of the chief persons in Athens, whom she had attended, coming forward in her behalf, and succeeding at last in getting the law abolished; women were thereafter allowed to practice medicine and to be paid a stipend for their service. No date whatever is attached to this story, but several persons have, by calling the tutor of Agnodice by the name of "Herophilos" instead of "Hierophilus", placed it in the 3rd or 4th century BC.
But this emendation, though at first sight very easy and plausible, does not appear altogether free from objections. For, in the first place, if the story is to be believed at all upon the authority of Hyginus, it would seem to belong rather to the 5th or 6th century BC than the 3rd or 4th; secondly, we have no reason for thinking that Agnodice was ever at Alexandria, or Herophilus at Athens; and thirdly, it seems hardly probable that Hyginus would have called so celebrated a physician "a certain Hierophilus" (Herophilus quidam.}[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Greenhill, William Alexander (1867), “Agnodice”, in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 74
- ^ Hyginus, Fabulae 274
- ^ Smith, R. Scott (2007). Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 181. ISBN 0-87220-820-6.
[edit] Other sources
- Ogilvie, M. B. 1986. Women in Science. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-65038-X
- John Lemprière's Classical Dictionary of 1848.
- This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1870).
