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Fabulla

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Fabulla or Fabylla (fl. before AD 210) was a medical writer of the Roman Empire, whose work survives only as two quotations in Galen.[1]

Identity

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Galen calls Fabulla a Libyan, but her name identifies her as Roman. She uses a Roman weight system (including the libra) to measure her ingredients, and this suggests that her work may have been written originally in Latin, and translated into Greek by Galen or a lost intermediary source. She was probably a medica ('female doctor').[2]

Works

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Galen references two medicines from Fabulla, 'for those with disease of the spleen, dropsy, sciatica, gout',[3] and shortly thereafter reproduces a Greek text of the recipes.[4] Fabulla herself attributes the first of these medicines to an earlier medica, Antiochis of Tlos.[2]

References

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  1. ^ Flemming 2007, p. 265.
  2. ^ a b Plant 2004, p. 159.
  3. ^ Gal. Comp. med. gen. 13.250.
  4. ^ Gal. Comp. med. gen. 13.341.

Sources

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