The Old Woman and the Doctor (or Physician) is a story of Greek origin that was included among

Aesop's Fables Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to ...

and later in the 4th century CE joke book, the '' Philogelos''. It is numbered 57 in the Perry Index.

A rare fable

This fable falls into the category of jokes that were added to the Aesop corpus through the attraction of his name. Because it was largely preserved in Greek sources, it was not noted in the rest of Europe until the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

. One of its first appearances then was in an early

Tudor period The Tudor period occurred between 1485 and 1603 in History of England, England and Wales and includes the Elizabethan period during the reign of Elizabeth I until 1603. The Tudor period coincides with the dynasty of the House of Tudor in Englan ...

jest book, '' Merry Tales and Quick Answers'' (c.1530), under the title "Of the olde woman that had sore eyes". The joke involves a woman who asks a surgeon (in this case) to cure her from approaching blindness on the understanding that he would not be paid until she was cured. The surgeon applied salves but stole from the house anything moveable during the course of his visits. Once the cure was completed, the woman refused him payment on the grounds that now her sight was worse than ever, since she could not see any of her household effects. The story was rendered into Latin by the Papal scholar

Gabriele Faerno The humanist scholar Gabriele Faerno, also known by his Latin name of Faernus Cremonensis, was born in Cremona about 1510 and died in Rome on 17 November, 1561. He was a scrupulous textual editor and an elegant Latin poet who is best known now for ...

and appeared in his collection of a hundred fables (1563) under the title "''Mulier et medicus''". His reason for preserving so slight a work was to amuse the children for whose education the book was destined. The moral he draws from it is that through evil-doing one loses the reward of any good one has done. Other English treatments include

Roger L'Estrange Sir Roger L'Estrange (17 December 1616 – 11 December 1704) was an English pamphleteer, author, courtier, and press censor. Throughout his life L'Estrange was frequently mired in controversy and acted as a staunch ideological defender of Kin ...

's in his ''Fables of Aesop'' (1692), which is little different from the version in ''Merry Tales and Quick Answers'' and comes to the cynical conclusion that 'There are few good Offices done for other People, which the Benefactor does not hope to be the better himself for’t'. A decade later

Thomas Yalden Thomas Yalden (2 January 1670 – 16 July 1736) was an English poet and translator. Educated at Magdalen College, Yalden entered the Church of England, in which he obtained various preferments. His poems include ''A Hymn to Darkness'', ''Pindaric ...

uses the tale for political propaganda in his ''Aesop at Court'' (1702). In his telling, the woman is despoiled by a whole team of doctors whom he likens to ministers in Parliament stealing English wealth to prosecute a foreign war.University of Virginia Librar
Fable 3
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References

{{Aesop Old Woman and the Doctor Old Woman and the Doctor Old Woman and the Doctor