When was trotula of salerno born

Trotula was present in the literature of the Middle Ages. In a bronze medal preserved in the Provincial Museum in Salerno was dedicated to her. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth century the medical school of Salerno gradually lost importance, supplanted by the University of Naples and Bologna. It was suppressed in by Joachim Murat part of the reorganization of the Education in the Kingdom of Naples.

The school had over time various locations, the first is supposed to be the castle of Arechi, then the classes were held in the chapel of St. The American writer and poet Henry W. It told the story of the young German Prince Henry who, engaged to the beautiful Princess Elsie, he was suddenly taken ill with leprosy.

A night he dreamed that the devil told him to go to Salerno where doctors would heal him, after a bath done in the blood of a virgin. The young girlfriend Elsie offered her life in sacrifice but the poor Henry refused indignantly. He still went to Salerno, where, before meeting the doctors, entered the cathedral to pray to St. Miraculously he healed from leprosy and married in the same church his girlfriend Elsie. Another legend tells that Robert of Normandy, injured during a crusade by a poisoned arrow, on his way back he stopped in Salerno for treatment.

The doctors prescribed that the poison had to be sucked from the wound, warning that the person sucking poison would be died poisoned; Roberto refused treatment. During the night, while Roberto slept, his wife Sibilla da Conversano sucked the poison saving the life of her husband, but dying soon after.

You might also like. She advocated a long, relaxed recovery from both illness and childbirth, was reported to have performed a successful Caesarian section, offered techniques for breech deliveries and could stitch up a perineum in a jiffy.

In general, she was all about preventative medicine as the key for promoting good health for women. In many ways, she was like the Oprah of her day, famous near and far for advocating low stress, regular physical activity and a sensible eating plan.

She was also a fan of massage, scented oils and a good long soak in the tub. Though her patients were doubtless quite grateful, and many of her colleagues at least tolerant of her approach to medicine, perhaps recognizing the need to address the particular needs of women within the field of medicine, the Church was not so sure.

The problem? Trotula's ways were in direct opposition to one of the most basic religious tenets of the time: the Curse of Eve. It was taken for granted and still is by many that women were supposed to suffer in childbirth and, frankly, life in general for Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden. Still, she managed to walk the line on that one, claiming instead it was because of women's perpetually fallen and disease-prone state that they were actually in need of more medical care than men, not less.

As a professor at the School of Salerno, Trotula taught her students a slow and measured approach to interacting with their patients. She believed in asking many questions about not only what was ailing them, but also about their lifestyle and problems in general. In this way, she asserted, the patient and attentive doctor would gain an improved understanding of the patient's physical state, and could therefore treat the problem more readily.

Though Trotula was free to teach at Salerno and practise in Italy during her lifetime, it was not to last. By the midth century, women were once again banned from the building and pretty much all other educational settings until the 19th century. Though it's easy to look back on Trotula and snicker with 21st-century hindsight, delighting in the irony of a groundbreaking female physician in medieval times using her power to tout a rehashed version of those misogynistic Galenic and Christian notions that had held sway for so long, her contribution -- indeed, her very existence in the canon of medical literature from this period -- is a testament to her charisma, intelligence and prescience.

One wonders if Tortula was simply playing the game, knowing full well that her male contemporaries would have been quick to pull the tapestry out from under her feet if she dared rock the boat. Perhaps she whispered different truths than the Church's in her patients' ears.

Or perhaps she simply believed in the weaker state of women. Debates about whether "Trotula" really existed began in the 16th century, generated in part out of the inherent inconsistencies in the assembled work that circulated under "her" name. Those debates persisted into the later 20th century, when the discovery of Trota's Practica secundum Trotam "Practical Medicine According to Trota" and philological analysis of other works associated with her allowed the real historic woman Trota to be seen independently from the textual creation "Trotula.

That information allows us to place her sometime in the first half of the twelfth century. Trota is associated as author or source with several different works. The work that Trota is most immediately associated with as author is the Practica secundum Trotam "Practical Medicine According to Trota" , which covers a variety of different medical topics, from infertility and menstrual disorders to snakebite and cosmetics. Benton found the text in a Madrid manuscript likely written at the very beginning of the 13th century.

This is the text known as De curis mulierum "On Treatments for Women". Trota cannot properly be called the "author" of this text, or at least not in the form in which it has survived, because she is cited within the text in the third person. Trota appears in an anecdote about a young woman suffering from ventositas matricis "wind in the uterus".