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Trotula is a name referring to a group of three texts on women's medicine that were composed in the southern Italian port town of Salerno in the 12th century. The name derives from a historic female figure, Trota of Salerno, a physician and medical writer who was associated with one of the three texts. However, "Trotula" came to be understood as a real person in the Middle Ages and because the so-called Trotula texts circulated widely throughout medieval Europe, from Spain to Poland, and Sicily to Ireland, "Trotula" has historic importance in "her" own right.
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Trota of Salerno was a medical practitioner and writer in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno who lived in the early or middle decades of the 12th century. Her fame spread as far as France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries. A Latin text that gathered some of her therapies was incorporated into an ensemble of treatises on women's medicine that came to be known as the Trotula, "the little book [called] 'Trotula'". Gradually, readers became unaware that this was the work of three different authors. They were also unaware of name of the historical writer, which was "Trota" and not "Trotula". The latter was thenceforth misunderstood as the author of the whole compendium. These misconceptions about the author of Trotula contributed to the erasure or modification of her name, gender, level of education, medical knowledge, or the time period in which the texts were written; this trend often resulted from the biases of later scholars. Trota's authentic work was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 20th century.
Adelle of the Saracens was an Italian physician. She belonged to the Saracinensa family and was a lay teacher at the medical faculty of Salerno. Her medical practice stemmed from roots in the Salerno Medical School and she practiced Medieval and Early Italian Renaissance Ideals in her medicine including Humanism.
Peretta Peronne was an unlicensed female surgeon operating in Paris in the early fifteenth century.
Mélanie Lipinska (1865–1933) was a Polish-French physician and known as a historian of women in medicine. She received recognition for her thesis Histoire des femmes médecins, which she submitted to the Académie de médecine de Paris in 1900.
The women of Salerno, also referred to as the ladies of Salerno and the Salernitan women, are a group of women physicians who studied in medieval Italy, at the Schola Medica Salernitana, one of the first medical schools to allow women.
References
- ↑ Walsh, James J. (2008). Old-time makers of medicine : the story of the students & teachers of the medieval medicine. Lethe Press. ISBN 9781590210956. OCLC 671253405.
- ↑ L. Whaley: Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800
