The next two chapters read/listen for and imagine into subjectivity, on the basis of the scant evidence available to us, the women of antiquity and their engagement with healing and with aspects of the health care systems operating in their contexts. The many questions raised in the opening chapter will be addressed to the variety of sources available, fragmentary though they may be, in order that the shadowy female figures engaged in healing either as healers or as healed might emerge with richer texture to their lives and to the socio-cultural and material contexts in which they lived. In many instances, we may find ourselves frustrated because the data which would enable us to answer the questions posed is simply not available. At other times, new questions and new categories of analysis may enable a new story to emerge from sources which have been seemingly tried and tested. Holt Parker draws the conclusion that ‘(w)omen physicians, though undoubtedly only a small percentage of the medical personnel, were an everyday part of the ancient world’.