Review
The book delivers more than it promises ... important book. Journal of Roman Studies Flemming's translations are accurate and some of these texts have not been translated into a modern language before. The book is therefore very useful because it makes all these materials accessible to the non-classicist and offers an overview to those more familiar with classical texts. Medical History In spite of the increased interest in both ancient medical science and the history of women, Rebecca Flemming's book covers a still quite neglected field by combining both of them. Medical History
Product Description
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.
