Early in the next century an Italian lady, Dorotea Bocchi, was actually Professor of Medicine at the University of Bologna,[12] and among the traditions of the same University is preserved the name of Alessandra Gigliani, who, in even earlier times, was a learned student of anatomy.[13] In the sixteenth century, at Alcarez in Spain, lived Olivia Sabuco de Nantes, who “had a large knowledge of science and medicine,” and whose medical works were printed at Madrid in 1588.[14] It is clear that in Great Britain at an early period women were commonly found among the irregular practitioners of medicine; and it is equally clear that their male competitors greatly desired to deprive them of the right to practise. In 1421 a petition was presented to Henry V., praying that “no woman use the practyse of fisyk under payne of long emprisonment.”[15] Within a few years after the first incorporation of the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, an Act[16] was passed for the relief and protection of “Divers honest psones, _as well men as women_, whom God hathe endued with the knowledge of the nature, kind, and operaçon of certeyne herbes, rotes, and waters, and the using and ministering them to suche as be payned with customable diseases, for neighbourhode and Goddes sake, and of pitie and charytie,” because the “Companie and Fellowship of Surgeons of London, mynding onlie their owne lucres and nothing the profit or ease of the diseased or patient, have sued, vexed, and troubled,” the aforesaid “honest psones,” who were henceforth to be allowed “to practyse, use, and mynistre in and to any outwarde sore, swelling, or disease, any herbes, oyntements, bathes, pultes or emplasters, according to their cooning experience and knowledge ... without sute, vexation, penaltie, or losse of their goods.”[17] This provision clearly referred to general practice other than that of midwifery, which latter branch of the profession was then, as for centuries both before and after, almost exclusively in the hands of women. The very word _midwife_, with its Latin synonym “_obstetrix_,” is sufficiently significant on this point, for in neither language has it any masculine equivalent, and the clumsy term “Man-midwife” served, when first needed and used, to mark the general sense of what the writer in the _Athenæum_ forcibly calls “masculine intrusion into that which natural instinct assigns to woman as her proper field of labour;” and this same very suggestive title is the only one which at the present day in legal phraseology distinguishes the male practitioners of this branch of medical art.