Medicine and the Making of Roman Women

Dr Flemming has written a book about women and medicine in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, an important but neglected period. It is about female medical practitioners and patients in the Roman world, what male doctors wrote about women, how they understood them, and the wider effects their ideas and writings had upon women's lives.

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In this book Dr Flemming includes new translations of some of the works of medical practitioners from Celsus, writing during the reign of Tiberius, to Galen, whose career ended under the Severans, and puts their ideas about women's bodies in their social and philosophical contexts.

Relations between women and medicine are now a major area of historical enquiry, but the Roman imperial era, despite the plentiful material it offers and the critical role it plays in the formation of the Western medical tradition, has received less than its fair share of the attention. This book seeks to redress the balance as it investigates female involvement in the manifold medical activities of the Roman world: how women fared as practitioners and patients, how they were understood and described in the copious medical writings of the period, and what effects those understandings and descriptions had in wider society. Dr Flemming examines both the contribution of medicine to gender in the Roman Empire, and the contribution of gender to medicine, and argues that the particularities of the Roman relationship between the two has much to reveal about how systems of sexual difference work in general.