I find it helpful when considering imagery of a given time, to try and see the images, as far as possible, as if I too lived then, and knew the same sort of things the artist knew and thus used to communicate to his intended audience - presumably people of his own time.
Language is an important consideration. To people of medieval Europe, whose formal education was all in Latin before the western cultural revolution (as it were), the object held by that figure would surely suggest the Latin term 'chelae'.
These days we use it chiefly to describe the claws of a real crab, other crustacean or insect, though a medieval Latin might have used that term to describe a couple of the instruments which have been pictured in this thread. (i I'd have to check a fairly comprehensive dictionary of medieval Latin terms to be sure, though).
By default, "chelae' would mean the claws of a crab, and most commonly those of the astronomical crab, or the scorpion. The medieval textbook, de Astronomia, thus reads in a recent translation:
Huius humeros et pectus a reliquo corpore dividit circulus, qui per utrosque polos transiens tangit Arietem et Chelas. Hic quod cum Tauro et Geminis orientibus et Cancro et Leone occidit, ideo sero occidere dicitur. Qui magis erectus a pedibus pervenit ad terram, at plagius ex-oriens citius quam Chelae videtur.
(Marco may be kind enough to translate that into natural English)
The use of green for this salt water is an interesting cultural difference found between the eastern and the western Mediterranean. As late as the fifteenth century, the most famous poet of Persia could still write of the "green seas of heaven" and in documentary sources, we see the distinction between blue for fresh water and green for salt water goes back to *before* the dynastic period in Egypt - so its use in the Vms is a very nice little "tell".
But anyway, in the Latin environment, the woman with that object would surely evoke reference to the astronomical chelae, or some other item known to them by the same term - medical or otherwise.
The latin quotation I gave above can be read in a paper published in 2011. It is by Wolfgang Metzger of the Wurtembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, and is entitled, 'Stars, Manuscripts and Astrolabes - the stellar constellations in a group of medieval manuscripts between Latin manuscripts and a new science of the stars'.
You can read it, print it off, or download it as a pdf from the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) site if you like.
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that link takes you staight to it.
Cheers