New Haven: Yale University Press, New York: Parthenon, Rowland, Beryl, ed. Judy Chicago American, b. The Dinner Party Trotula place setting , — Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, Photograph by Jook Leung Photography. The Dinner Party Trotula plate , — The Dinner Party Trotula runner , — Judy Chicago. Vaccination proof required. On View Events Tickets Shop.
Not far away, at the monastery of Monte Cassino a translation centre was established to translate Arabic works of interest to a Europe which awaking to the scientific advances occurring in the Islamic world to their south and east. Medicine was the field for which Salerno was most known in this time and the practice of medicine that grew up there was known as the Scuola Medica Salernitana. As with most legends there is a grain of truth; although later scholarship is unable to verify the legend.
What has been demonstrated is that the monks of Monte Cassino and the medicine practised in Salerno were closely linked. The thread that linked them and the legends together was Constantine the African. He appears to have travelled widely to such places as Egypt, Baghdad, Babylon also long destroyed at the time and India. His medical knowledge caused him to be suspected of sorcery and he ultimately fled to Salerno, where on one account a visiting prince from the east noticed him and pointed him out to Robert Guiscard.
As a result he served for a time as private secretary to the Norman duke. Soon enough however he withdrew to a monastic life in Monte Cassino where he translated at least 20 major treatises on medicine from Arabic into Latin. Notably his translations typically did not credit the Arabic originals. Her name appears as one of the more prominent authorities in the earliest compendium of the medicine of Salerno the Compendium Salernitanum.
Although this might have been Trotula; it is just as likely to have been one of a circle of skilled women who practised medicine in Salerno at this time. But in truth little is known and such legends are of more recent confection.
Trota was a common name in southern Italy in the twelfth century, and the name appears seventy times in Salerno records of the time: but which one is our Trota? It is sad so little is known of a woman whose named was so renowned.
Suffice to say that modern scholarship has debunked such theories, although it is unable to tell much of her actual life. Glimmerings of her life are fictionalized in works such as the Mistress of Death by Ariana Franklin and in Italian Trotula by Paola Presciuttini who takes the legends as the core of her story.
What can be said with some certainty is that Trotula was not the only woman who practised the healing arts in Salerno. She was likely one of many women healers who practised medicine in the city. What makes her particularly famous and unique, beyond her exceptional skills, is that her writings have come down to us in the modern day. But she was the exception rather than the rule. The professionalization of medicine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries led to an exclusion of women practitioners from the best paid and most respected medical positions.
Monica Green, one of the most prolific scholars of Trotula tells us the fate of Perretta Petona, a woman who practised surgery in the fifteenth century in Paris. She was charged with the unlicensed practice of surgery. Rather than denying she practised medicine, Perretta referred to the traditional learning handed down to her by her relatives and other practitioners, explaining her considerable success in the profession.
It did her no good. For she was illiterate and interrogated by the university trained men. She was mocked, humiliated and driven from practice. It might be added that the theories which dominated the book learning, in which the male scholars so prided themselves, were shown in the course of time to be almost entirely nonsense. It was not until that a work definitively attributable to Trotula was discovered by John F.
Benton in a library in Madrid. This work, as suggested by its title, is the practice of medicine according to Trota. Only very little is known about the life of Trotula of Salerno.
She may have belonged to the wealthy di Ruggiero family and may have been married to the physician Johannes Platearius and had two sons. Some scholars believe that both Trotula and her husband authored practica brevis , a work that discusses medical diseases. She is also alleged to have been the first female professor of medicine and the first female gynecologist. Some scholars assert that Trotula taught at the School of Salerno, earning the title of Magistra Medicinae.
At least the evidence that numerous women have graduated from the School of Salerno since its inception validates the fact that Trotula herself attended the institution. As there is little documented evidence about Trotula, there has been much conjecture as to what happened within her life.
There are many that believe that she was a revolutionary woman that existed and was indeed one of the first female medical figures. There is further evidence that Trotula existed within the literature that came out of the middle ages.
One of the books that Chaucer has him reading is a work by Trotula, The Trotula Major , and it is implied that even the Wife herself was very familiar with the practices presented in this book. Illustration from Passionibus mulierum curandorum or Trotula major. The manuscripts of the Trotula that are found represent only a small portion of the original number that circulated around Europe from the late 12th century to the end of the 15th century.
Nevertheless, the most important evidence of her existence are her writings. Moreover, she gives general medical advice for treating snakebites, curing bad breath and lightening freckles.
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