Byzantine Female Physicians: “Pearl-Like Hardenings” by Aspasia

Abstract

The history of women’s professions is hard to trace, especially in ancient times. Evidence of medical assistance in early Christian charitable institutions (xenones) and traces of female physicians working in that region has come to us in funerary stelae. Female physicians also appear in the medical literature. A text on Pearl-like hardenings by Aspasia, a female physician, presumably from the sixth century AD, figures in the Tetrabiblion, an extensive compilation by the great Byzantine compiler Aëtius of Amida (AD 502-575). The bumps were described by the French surgeon Guillaume Desnoues (1650-1735) in 1681 and named after the German anatomist and physician Martin Naboth, professor of Chemistry at Leipzig (1675-1721), shortly after in 1701. In this article, we give notice of a description of the bumps (nabothian cysts), bringing to light the name of Aspasia that identified cervical mucous cysts in Ancient History.

 Nabothian cysts; Byzantine medicine; Women Physicians; Aspasia; Aëtius of Amida; Aëtius of Amida