Referring to the earliest classical times, we find distinct mention in the Iliad of a woman skilled in the science of medicine,[4] and a similar reference occurs also in the Odyssey.[5] Euripides is no less valuable a witness on this point. He describes Queen Phædra[6] as disturbed in mind and out of health, and represents the nurse as thus addressing her: “If thy complaint be anything of the more secret kind, here are women at hand to compose the disease. But if thy distress is _such as may be told to men_, tell it, that it may be reported to the physicians;” thus indicating a prevailing public opinion that there were natural and rigid limits to the medical attendance of men and women, and that therefore some women were specially trained to do what the regular physicians must leave undone. It is at least remarkable to find such evidence of general feeling on this matter in a state of society supposed to possess much less delicacy and refinement than our own. We find records of several Grecian women who were renowned for their medical skill, among whom may be instanced Olympias of Thebes, whose medical learning is said to be mentioned by Pliny; and Aspasia, from whose writings on the diseases of women, quotations are preserved in the works of Aëtius, a Mesopotamian physician.[7] On the authority of Hyginus rests the history of Agnodice, the Athenian maiden whose skill and success in medicine was the cause of the legal opening of the medical profession to all the free-born women of the State.[8] In more modern times, when almost all learning was garnered into the religious houses, which were not only the libraries but the hospitals of the day, it seems evident that the care of the sick and wounded fell at least as often to the share of the Nunneries as of the Monasteries, and probably medical skill, such as it was, found place among the sisters quite as often as among the brethren of the various religious Orders. The old ballad of Sir Isumbras gives one illustration out of many of the prevailing state of things, relating how the nuns received the wounded knight, and how “Ilke a day they made salves new, And laid them on his wounds, They gafe hym metis and drynkes lythe, And heled the knyghte wonder swythe.”[9] It may be remembered that Sir Walter Scott,[10] after describing how Rebecca “proceeded, with her own hands, to examine and bind up the wounds,” goes on to remark, “The youngest reader of romances and romantic ballads must recollect how often the females, during the dark ages, as they are called, were initiated into the mysteries of surgery.... The Jews, both male and female, possessed and practised the medical science in all its branches.” In the fourteenth century, when the Medical School of Salerno enjoyed high reputation, we find record of a female physician named Abella, who lived there, and wrote in Latin various works on medicine.[11]