According to Greek mythology, the god of the medical art was Æsculapius, a male; but his six daughters, as antiquity beautifully expressed it, were not only goddesses but were also medical mistresses—artifices medici—of suffering humanity. Of these Hygiea was specially distinguished as the goddess of health, or, rather, as the conserver of good health, while Panacea was invoked as the restorer of health after it had been impaired or lost.
One of the most beautiful pictures in the Iliad is that representing the daughter of Augea, King of the Epei, caring for the wounded and suffering Greeks on the plain before Troy. She was:
"His eldest born, hight Agamede, with golden hair,
A leech was she, and well she knew all herbs on ground that grew."
Nothing deterred by the din of battle around her, she provided cordial potions for the disabled warrior and prepared
"The gentle bath and washed their gory wounds."
What a beautiful prototype of another ministering angel in the same land nearly thirty centuries later, amid similar scenes of suffering—of one who, though unsung by immortal bard, the world will never let die—the courageous, the self-sacrificing Florence Nightingale.
That there were in Greece from the earliest times numerous women possessed of a high degree of medical skill is evidenced by many of the ancient writers. They were what we would call medical herbalists, and not a few of them exhibited a natural genius for determining the curative virtues of rare plants and a remarkable sagacity in preparing from them juices, infusions and soothing anodynes. Others there were who, in addition to evincing the cunning of leechcraft in the therapeutic art, were distinguished for nimble hands in treating painful lesions and festering sores, and who, when occasion required, were experts in "quickly drawing the barb from the flesh and healing the wound of the soldier."
In the Odyssey special mention is made of the surpassing expertness of the Egyptian female leech, Polydamna, whose name signifies the subduer of many diseases. The land of the Nile, the poet tells us, "teems with drugs," and
"There ev'ry man in skill medicinal
Excels, for these are sons of Pæon all."
In this favored cradle of civilization, to which Greece owed so much of its knowledge and culture, there were many women who, like Polydamna, achieved distinction in the healing art, and many, too, we have reason to think, who communicated their knowledge to their sisters in the fair land of Hellas.