Muscio (also Mustio) is the supposed author of the ''Genecia'' (''Gynaecia''), a treatise of gynecology dating to ca. AD 500, preserved in a manuscript of ca. AD 900. The treatise borrows heavily from Soranus. Nothing is known about the life of Muscio. Analysis of his vocabulary suggests that he may have come from

North Africa North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...

. The usually cited 6th century date for his work is somewhat doubtful. His one surviving work is a simplified, and abbreviated,

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

translation of the ''Gynecology'' of Soranus. The first part is composed in a form of question-and-answer on many matters to do with

female anatomy Sex differences in human physiology are distinctions of physiological characteristics associated with either male or female humans. These differences are caused by the effects of the different sex chromosome complement in males and females, and di ...

, embryology, and matters of birth and neonatal care. The second part covers pathological conditions. Numerous copies of this work from the ninth to the fifteenth century still survive, and it was the most important source for

Eucharius Rösslin Eucharius Rösslin (Roslin, Rößlin), sometimes known as Eucharius Rhodion, (c. 1470 – 1526) was a German physician who in 1513 authored a book about childbirth called ''Der Rosengarten'' (The Rose Garden), which became a standard medical t ...

when he wrote his ''Rosengarten'' in 1513. In

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

times, the work was translated into Greek, and, as a result, Muscio came to be thought of as Greek and wrongly identified with Moschion, a Greek physician mentioned by Soranus.Owsei Temkin, (1991), ''Soranus' Gynecology'', page xlv. JHU Press

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External links

Google books copy
of 1882

Teubner The Bibliotheca Teubneriana, or ''Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana'', also known as Teubner editions of Greek and Latin texts, comprise one of the most thorough modern collection published of ancient (and some medieval) ...

edition by Valentin Rose {{Authority control 6th-century books Ancient gynaecologists 9th-century manuscripts 6th-century Roman physicians 6th-century Latin writers