Agnodice - A Physician's Tale
The first female physician and midwife in Ancient Athens
Picture this: You live in Athens. It is sometime during the 4th century BCE, and you are 9 months pregnant. This is your first child. You have prepared clean cloths, hot water, and an antique diaper bag and you are ready. You have your first labor contraction, gaze angrily at your half-asleep husband and demand he fetches the midwife. He comes up to you, holds your hand, and gently whispers: “Midwifery is illegal.”
A short while before the year 300 BCE every child in Athens was born in the presence of a midwife. Midwifery was a well-established and respected career for women. They often had many years of experience in helping other women conceive and deliver, and would even perform abortions. But male doctors at the time were increasingly intimidated by the growing expertise of these midwives. So, as is often the case with female reproductive rights, when Hippocrates (known as the “Father Of Medicine”) opened a school that only taught men, midwifery became illegal and punishable by death.
After the ban, male physicians took over the role of OBGYN. Due to their lack of experience (and I imagine a genuine lack of interest), they often diagnosed their female patients with diseases related to being female. For example, a woman could be cursed with a wandering womb; a disease during which the uterus would detach from its place and float around the body — a clear explanation for female hysterics or (dare-I-say-it) witchcraft.
In addition, it WAS 300 BCE in a society that highly valued modesty. These male physicians were often not allowed into the homes of women who were in labor. As a result, the female and infant mortality rates were alarmingly high.
Agnodice grew up under these conditions. Frustrated with the state of affairs for women, she decided to study medicine and become a physician herself. So, in a true She’s The Man manner, she cut her hair short, disguised herself as a man, and went to Alexandria to study medicine under Herophilos — a gynecologist who had just discovered the ovaries.
After finishing her studies, Agnodice returned to Athens and began to see patients, when she overheard a woman screaming in her house from labor pains. Disguised as a man, she rushed inside and offered to help but was turned away. So, as any doctor would do in that situation, she stripped from the waist down, revealed that she was a woman, and was permitted inside.
The news of her talent spread across the female community and she soon became a very successful and popular physician. Naturally, this evoked the jealousy of her male colleagues who accused her of seducing the women she was treating (thereby getting all the *business* and leaving nothing for them) and put her on trial.
To prove that she was not impregnating the women with illegitimate children, Agnodice once again undressed from the waist down and revealed herself as a woman. Her colleagues’ temporary relief of the legitimacy of the children of Athens was quickly replaced with outrage since midwifery was illegal and she was sentenced to death.
[Stressful Music Intensifies]
Before they had a chance to carry out the sentence, her patients (some the wives of very important Athenians) stormed the court room demanding she be set free while praising her for her work and for saving their lives. Seeing a mob of angry women scared the Athenian court into freeing Agnodice and amending the law to allow women to practice medicine — as long as they only treated female patients.
What a wild ride! The only surviving text we know of that refers to Agnodice is Gaius Julius Hyginus’s Fabulae — a collection of 300 myths and genealogies. While it is likely that the story of Agnodice is a myth, many believe that it is a legend built around a real personage. But myth or not, by using Agnodice’s story, women were able to trace midwifery to ancient times and use it to support their role in practicing medicine since the 17th century. Today, Agnodice continues to be remembered as the first female physician, and perhaps the first case of fake it until you make it.