Amalia Moretti Foggia

Amalia Moretti Foggia (May 11, 1872 – July 11, 1947) was an Italian physician and journalist. She is the third woman to graduate in medicine at the University of Bologna. She is also known as Dottor Amal and Petronilla, pseudonyms used by her during her career in journalism. Quotes “Deambulare necesse est; it is necessary to walk, if you wish to fully enjoy that great good which is perfect health! But you, do you complete it, every day, your indispensable walk? And how long is it? All day you spend working upright on your feet, never sitting; and therefore you always feel very tired? But yours is not walking; remember: it is standing.” “It is as if from those years in which I began to write for the ‘Domenica’ I had begun to live two different but complementary lives, one of an emancipated, modern and intellectual woman, the other of a ‘little housewife’, all devoted to children, husband, and cooking. My guide has always been to be simple, spontaneous and true. It is as if knowing I existed in those columns had given more meaning to my life, and a strong thread had tied me to the lives of all those women.” “Posterity knows me (or would have known me) only as Petronilla, ‘the one of the recipes in La Domenica del Corriere’, and as Dr. Amal, but the real Amalia, the doctor who in an era in which no respectable bourgeois would have herself treated by a woman, had to pretend to be a man in order to be credible.” Internal link