ABSTRACT
In antiquity, when professional medicine was in its infancy, this was certainly the main arena of healing but because of its very nature as popular and non-professional, it is the area for which we have least surviving data. Healing women are depicted as having a power which they can use over men and hence this must be controlled. Agamede and Polydama, both of whom are introduced to readers by way of relationship with their husbands Thon and Mulius, stand forth from the literature, however, as women with knowledge of herbs and their medicinal powers. The midwife straddles the boundaries between secular and religio-magic folk medicine, using both herbal drugs and incantations. Male physicians, according to the Oath, are to assist and not harm male and female, slave and free patients and Dean-Jones offers evidence of male physicians examining and treating female patients.
