Soranus of Ephesus

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Soranus of Ephesus — the latter an ancient city in Ionian (Greek) Asia Minor, now western Turkey — gained lasting fame as a learned Greek scientific physician in the late 1st and early 2nd century CE (the 100s CE), specializing in pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology. His work influenced the practice of medicine in diseases of women, including pregnancy and the care of infants until after the Renaissance. He wrote one of the earliest biographies of Hippocrates of Cos.

Soranus appears to have begun his medical career in Alexandria, a major city and Mediterranean seaport of northern Egypt and at the time a preeminent center of scientific medicine, where he possibly began or advanced his learning of anatomy. His extant writings indicate his knowledge of the anatomical studies of the uterus by the Alexandrian physician, Herophilus, and that of Alexandrian pediatric and obstetric medical and surgical practice.  (See esp. pp.xli, 11). Subsequently, he moved to Rome, practicing during the reigns of the emperors Trajan (98-117 CE) and Hadrian (117-138 CE).

Historians of medicine, both ancient and modern, reserve a place for Soranus among the great medical practitioners of the Greco-Roman world, setting him in a direct line that begins with Hippocrates, extends through the early anatomists Herophilus and Erasistratus, and culminates in Galen. In spite of his lofty reputation, Soranus’ medical writings have not survived intact into modern times, and nothing from Soranus' hand is free of alteration through epitomization, translation, or other fragmentation (section I). Most fully preserved in the original Greek are the first two books of his gynecological treatise, 'Gynaikeia’.