Professor Monica H. Green, professor of history at Arizona State University, is presenting a lecture on women in medicine at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 27 at Coastal Carolina University. The talk, which is free and open to the public, is in room 136 of the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts building. A reception will follow.

Green's talk is titled "The Medieval Origins of Women's Marginal Status in Medicine, or, Why Elizabeth Blackwell was (not) the 'First Woman Physician.'" The lecture will explore the reasons why it took more than six centuries for European women who practiced medicine to join the ranks of professional physicians.

Green holds affiliate appointments in Women's and Gender Studies; bioethics; and the program in Social Science and Global Health in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU.

"Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts," a collection of her major essays, was co-winner of the 2004 John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book in medieval studies from the Medieval Academy of America. Her other publications include "The 'Trotula': A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine," of which she was both editor and translator.

Green has directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on "Disease in the Middle Ages" in summer 2009 in London, and has held fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies, All Soul's College Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center and various others.

Most recently, she was awarded the 2009 History of Science Society's coveted Rossiter Prize for best book on the history of women and science.

Green's lecture is sponsored by the Nancy Smith Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Series.

For more information, contact Eliza Glaze at 843-234-3462.