On 1 Jan 2008, Keyser & Irby‑Massie’s encyclopedia entry on Metrodora formally summarized the Florence manuscript attributing a medical treatise to her.
On 1 January 2008, the reference work Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and Its Many Heirs, edited by Keyser and Irby‑Massie, included an entry on Metrodora that synthesized modern scholarly understanding of her and the Florence manuscript Pluteus 75.3.
The entry describes the codex in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana as preserving a collection of medical remedies traditionally attributed to an otherwise unknown woman physician active somewhere between roughly 50–400 CE. By integrating Metrodora into a major scholarly encyclopedia, the authors placed her alongside canonical male figures in ancient science, such as Galen and Hippocrates, and emphasized the rarity of a surviving medical text attributed to a woman.
This publication marked a significant moment in the historiography of women in science: it codified Metrodora’s treatise as a legitimate subject of academic study, summarized the state of evidence, and highlighted the uncertainties surrounding her date and biography. In doing so, the encyclopedia entry helped standardize modern references to Metrodora, guided subsequent research, and made information about her accessible to classicists, historians of medicine, and gender‑studies scholars worldwide. It reinforced that, even in the absence of rich biographical data, her attributed work represents a crucial witness to female authorship in ancient technical literature.