Female Doctors Through the History

Female Doctors Through the History

Despite the difficulties they faced in making their way in the world of science

and technology, women have proven themselves to be enormous contributors to

medicine throughout history.

Agnodice: In the old Athens, there was, for a long of time, a law that forbade

all the women from studying or practicing any form of medicine, especially

gynecology—in fact, it was considered a crime punishable by death. However, it’s

well-known that a woman, named Agnodice, disguised herself as a man and went to

study under Herophilus of Chalcedon, a famous doctor and physician of Alexandria.

When she came back from Athens, still looking like a man, coursed medicine

successfully between the women of the aristocracy. She took a great amount of the

profits from the other doctors, causing that they conspired against her, accusing her

of illicit intimacy with the opposite gender.

When she had to appear in the court, clearly, Agnodice could do nothing to

disprove these charges other than display the most obvious proof and so, the legend

goes, without hesitation she pulled open her robes and exposed herself to the jury.

This, of course, only made things going worse for Agnodice. The revelation of

her secret pushed the men of the jury from angry to livid. Furious that a woman had

been practicing medicine openly, they immediately sentenced Agnodice to death and

set a date for her execution.

Nevertheless, a massive group of Athenian women stormed the assembly,

demanding that Agnodice must be released, threatening with kill themselves if

Agnodice was execute. Thanks to that resistance, Agnodice carried on with her life,

making a big change in the culture: freeborn women could legally study and practice

medicine, as long as they treated only female patients.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler: was born in 1831 in Delaware, the second of five

children all listed as “mulatto” in the 1880 U.S. census.

Although she

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