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Trotula of Salerno
(c. 1097)
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Down to the sixteenth century obstetrics was almost exclusively in the hands of midwives, who were trained for it as for a trade. Only in rare cases was a surgeon called in. All the achievements of ancient times seemed forgotten, and it was only after anatomical studies had been resumed and surgery had made some progress that things began to improve. The most important accounts of the condition of ancient operative obstetrics are found in the Hippocratic writings (position of the child, version or turning, dismemberment of the fetus, parturition chair for facilitating delivery) and in later times in the works of Soranus of Ephesus (second century A.D.; protection of the perinaeum), Galen, Celsus, Atius, and in those of the female physician Trotula of Salerno. Trotula gained repute as a physician and obstetrician, leaving behind at least one manuscript. She wrote works on obstetrics and gynaecology which remained authoritative for several centuries, this illumination comes from a manuscript of De Passionibus mulierum (on the sufferings of women) in the Wellcome Collections. Trotula was an early advocate of balanced diet, regular exercise, cleanliness, and a low stress lifestyle.
A related work, The Trotula was the most influential compendium of women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. But the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world. The Trotula reifies Galenic notions - predicated upon the original curse of Eve - of the female as inferior, naturally susceptible to more disease than the male. As such, woman has special medical needs appropriate only for other women to investigate and treat. Taking such presuppositions for granted, the Trotula illustrates the scientific, Christian emendations that tend to bring this "naturally fallen" state back into the God's timeless plan for humanity. Such subtexts will lead us to see the way in which theology and morality impact scientific theory and practice. The English Trotula speaks of the shame associated with the female body and yet also describes procedures that put body parts on display in such a way that the overdetermined boundaries of the female body are illustrated. These transient boundaries can lead us to understand how the female body manifests the way in which a culture's anxieties became appended to that culture's notion of transcendence. The image of women as heirs of Eve's faults becomes, in the Christian moral system, an outside force against which a culture defined itself as proper and unified. And yet this exterior "other" is also part of the culture; like their ability to give birth, women had this Eve-like digressive potential inside them.
The School of Salerno is regarded as the oldest medical school of the West. Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea, originally probably a Doric colony, was from the sixth to the eleventh century under the rule of the Lombards, and from 1075 to 1130 under that of the Normans. In 1130 it became a part of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. The origin of the school is obscure, but, contrary to former belief, it was not a religious foundation, though very many priests were engaged there as teachers of medicine. Women and even Jews were admitted to these studies. Salerno was destined to cultivate for a long time Greek medical science in undimmed purity, until the twelfth century saw the school fall a victim to the all-powerful Arab influence. One of its oldest physicians was Alpuhans, later (1058-85) Archbishop of Salerno. With him worked the Lombard Gariopontus (d. 1050), whose Passionarius is based upon Hippocrates, Galen, and Caelius Aurelianus. Contemporary with him was the female physician Trotula who worked also in the literary field, and who is said to have been the wife of the physician Joannes Platearius. Perhaps the best known literary work of this school is the anonymous Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum a didactic poem consisting of 364 stanzas, which has been translated into all modern languages. It is said to have been dedicated to Prince Robert, son of William the Conqueror, upon his departure from S. Salerno in 1101. An important change in the intellectual tendency of the Civitas Hippocratica, as this school called itself, was brought about by the physician Constantine of Carthage (Constantinus Africanus), a man learned in the Oriental languages and a teacher of medicine at Salerno, who died in 1087 a monk of Monte Cassino. While hitherto the best works of Greek Antiquity had been known only in mediocre Latin translations, Constantine in the solitude of Monte Cassino began to translate to translate from the Arabic, Greek authors (e.g. the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and the Ars parva of Galen), as well as such Arabic writer as were accessible to him (Isaak, Ali Abbas). As he brought to the knowledge of his contemporaries first-class Greek authors, but only secondary Arab writers, the study of the former became more profound, while on the other hand an interest was awakened in the hitherto unknown Arabic literature. His pupils were Bartholomaeus, whose Practica was translated into German as early as the thirteenth century, and Johannes Afflacius (De febribus et urinis). To the twelfth century, when Arabian polypharmacy was introduced, belong Nicolaus Praepositus (about 1140), whose Antidotarium, a collection of compounded pharmaceutical formulae, became a model for later works of this kind, and Matthaeus Platearius, who, towards the end of the century, wrote a commentary on the above-named Antidotarium (Glossae) and a work about simple drugs (Circa instans). Similar productions appeared from the hand of an otherwise unknown Magister Solernitanus. Maurus, following Arabian sources, wrote on uroscopy. Here must be also mentioned Petrus Musandinus (De cibis et potibus febricitantium), the teacher of Pierre Giles of Corbeil (Ægidius Corboliensis), who later became a canon and the physician-in-ordinary to Philip Augustus of France (1180-1223), and who even at this day began to complain about the decay of the school. [Adapted from Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) and Cultural Bodies in Medieval Medical Writings about Women]
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