This article profiles Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was born in Bermersheim, Germany, near Alzey in 1098 to the nobleman Hildebert von Bermersheim and his wife Mechthild, as their tenth and last child. Hildegard began prolific literary activity in the year 1141, with the first work of her visionary trilogy, the "Liber Scivias," on which she worked for a decade. In the 1150s Hildegard wrote her works on the natural and medical sciences, through which she became significant in European medical history. This work brought her the title of "first German woman physician." Hildegard of Bingen died in 1179 and was revered as a saint in the Catholic Church by the early fourteenth century. Hildegard's visionary themes and theories (the image of God, the human being as God's image, gender symbolism, the strength of female weakness, woman and wisdom, and the weakness of male strength) enriched the image of both God and Man in a patriarchal time, and continues to confront, challenge, and inspire individuals more than nine centuries later.