Athenion (physician)

Athenion (Ancient Greek: Ἀθηνίων) was a physician of ancient Greece, probably from Athens.^[1] He was mentioned by the physician and medical writer Soranus of Ephesus as being a member of the Empiric school, and a follower of the celebrated anatomist Erasistratus, and so must therefore have lived some time between the third century BCE and the first century CE.^[2]

Soranus writes that Athenion believed that there were diseases peculiar to women,^[3][4] or at least conditions peculiar to women, that merited women's health being looked at differently from the way men's health was.^[5]

There is another obscure physician of this name whose works are mentioned by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who may be the same person.^[6]

References

1. Stok, Fabio (2018). "Medical Sects: Herophilus, Erasistratus, Empiricists". In Keyser, Paul; Scarborough, John (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World. Oxford University Press. p. 376. ISBN 9780190878832. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
2. Soranus of Ephesus, De Arte Obstetr. p. 210
3. Soranus of Ephesus (1956). Gynecology. Translated by Temkin, Owsei. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-8018-4320-4. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
4. von Staden, Heinrich (2018). "Rupture and continuity: Hellenistic reflections on the history of medicine". In van der Eijk, P.J. (ed.). Ancient Histories of Medicine: Essays in Medical Doxography and Historiography in Classical Antiquity. Brill Publishers. p. 166. ISBN 9789004377479. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
5. Longrigg, James, ed. (2013). Greek Medicine: From the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age A Source Book. Taylor & Francis. p. 192. ISBN 9781136782190. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
6. Aulus Cornelius Celsus, De Medicina 5.25. p. 95

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Greenhill, William Alexander (1870). "Athenion". In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. p. 403.