Trota of Salerno, physician

A woman physician, now nearly forgotten, wrote one of the most widely distributed treatises on the medical problems of women in the 12th century. Nothing is known about the real life of Trota of Salerno, who apparently lived in Italy in the late 1100's. It was only in 1985 that an important work written by her was discovered in Spain by John F. Benton, the Practica Scundum Trotam (Practical Medicine According to Trota), which covers a variety of different medical topics, from infertility and menstrual disorders to snakebite and cosmetics. Trota also wrote a treatise on the medical treatment of women De Curis Mulierum (On the Treatment of Women). This text was combined with 2 others on similar topics in a work called the Trotula. This 3-part text then came down in history as the work of one person, Trotula, causing confusion with the name of this one author. Monica H. Green posits that the text seems to capture the collective practices of one group of female practitioners, setting down their cures for readers who will have the same unfettered access to the bodies of their female patients: "it appears to have been written down to provide a more permanent and concrete mechanism for the transmission of knowledge from woman to woman than the oral forms that had traditionally served the needs of Salernitan women. . . . [T]he text posits a community of female readers who would be able to rely on this text for instruction . . ." The earliest copy of this text is found in England at the Bodleian Library. It contains a few English words, suggesting that the text was among those transferred by the Normans from their Italian kingdoms to other areas of their influence.