[Gynecology and obstetrics in Ancient Rome]

Gods and Goddesses were invoked by the Romans for the termination of a good delivery. Diana, Juno, Lucina and Cybele were the preferred ones. Sterility was sometimes treated by the whip of the Lupercali of ministers of Pan. The first doctors in Rome were coming from Greece. Celsus, Pliny the Elder were encyclopedists, Rufus an anatomist, Dioscorides a pharmacologist. Archigenes, Aretaeus and Antyllus surgeons. Soranus from Ephesus, was the first to recommend podalic version. His works was a long time buried in a profound oblivion and discovered by scholars during the nineteenth century. Galen was looked as the most famous medical man after Hippocrates. During the Roman Empire of Occident (Byzantine Empire), Oribasius, Aurelianus Caelius, Moschion and above all Aetius and Paul of Aegina wrote many works which were many times plagiarized. Roman laws concerning public health were severe. Midwives took an important action in the care of pregnant women. Roman poets as Plautus, Terence, Lucilius, Catullus, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid and Martial were many times concerned in their writings with gynecologic or obstetric subjects. Children were easily forsaken. Three Emperors, Trajan, Marcus-Aurelius and Alexander Severius, a writer, Aulu-Gelles, and a rhetor, Quintilian, took protection of them.