Women in Ancient Medicine & Alchemy: Reconsidering Evidence, Authorship & Practice examines the historical and historiographical foundations through which women’s roles in early medicine, pharmaka, and alchemical practice have been constructed, obscured, and, at times, misrepresented.
Drawing upon textual, epigraphic, and material evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, this study argues that women were not peripheral to the development of medical and experimental traditions, but were integral to their formation and transmission. From temple-based practitioners and perfumers to midwives, physicians, and alchemical figures, women’s embodied and technical knowledge underpinned practices later reframed within male-authored intellectual systems.
By interrogating the linguistic, philosophical, and historiographical frameworks that have shaped the surviving record, this work challenges the enduring division between “magic” and “medicine,” and between symbolic and technical knowledge. In doing so, it proposes a re-reading of ancient sources that restores continuity between domestic practice, ritual procedure, and early scientific inquiry.
This study contributes to a growing body of scholarship seeking not only to recover women’s presence in the ancient world, but to reconsider the epistemological structures through which knowledge itself has been categorised, preserved, and legitimised.
Women in Ancient Medicine is a fully referenced research essay featuring Chicago-style footnotes and an appendix reference chart examining women’s roles in medicine, pharmacology, ritual practice, and proto-alchemical traditions across the ancient Mediterranean world.
• 56-page A5 printed booklet
• Professionally formatted with academic references and bibliography
• Self-published by DOSE Botanicals
• Independent scholarly publication
• First revised edition, 2026
© 2026 Jaynaya D’Esterre Atkins, DOSE Botanicals.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations used in academic review or scholarly citation.
Women in Ancient Medicine & Alchemy: Reconsidering Evidence, Authorship & Practice examines the historical and historiographical foundations through which women’s roles in early medicine, pharmaka, and alchemical practice have been constructed, obscured, and, at times, misrepresented.
Drawing upon textual, epigraphic, and material evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, this study argues that women were not peripheral to the development of medical and experimental traditions, but were integral to their formation and transmission. From temple-based practitioners and perfumers to midwives, physicians, and alchemical figures, women’s embodied and technical knowledge underpinned practices later reframed within male-authored intellectual systems.
By interrogating the linguistic, philosophical, and historiographical frameworks that have shaped the surviving record, this work challenges the enduring division between “magic” and “medicine,” and between symbolic and technical knowledge. In doing so, it proposes a re-reading of ancient sources that restores continuity between domestic practice, ritual procedure, and early scientific inquiry.
This study contributes to a growing body of scholarship seeking not only to recover women’s presence in the ancient world, but to reconsider the epistemological structures through which knowledge itself has been categorised, preserved, and legitimised.
Women in Ancient Medicine is a fully referenced research essay featuring Chicago-style footnotes and an appendix reference chart examining women’s roles in medicine, pharmacology, ritual practice, and proto-alchemical traditions across the ancient Mediterranean world.
• 56-page A5 printed booklet
• Professionally formatted with academic references and bibliography
• Self-published by DOSE Botanicals
• Independent scholarly publication
• First revised edition, 2026
© 2026 Jaynaya D’Esterre Atkins, DOSE Botanicals.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations used in academic review or scholarly citation.
