Tea at Trianon: Women Physicians in Greece, Rome and Byzantium

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 8, 2013

Women Physicians in Greece, Rome and Byzantium

From History of the Ancient World:

The history of women as professionals in medicine does not begin in America in 1849 with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to earn an M.D. in modern times; nor in Naples in 1422, with Costanza Calenda, the first woman we know of to receive a doctorare in medicine from a university; nor in Naples in 1321, with Francesca de Romana, the earliest woman we currently know to have heen licensed to practice medicine generally, nor in Catania in 1276, with Virdimura, a Jew and wife of a Doctor Pasquale, who was licenced to practice on paupers, but extends back to at least the fifth century B.C. in Greece. (Read entire post.)