Trota of Salerno (also spelled Trocta), often called Trotula, 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. She was one of a group of women physicians who studied in medieval Italy at the Schola Medica Salernitana, the first medical schools to allow women in Europe.
Trotula's fame
Her fame spread as far as France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries. A Latin text that gathered some of her therapies (and recounted a cure she had performed) 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 the 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 (including a collection of her cures, known as the Practical Medicine According to Trota) was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 20th century.
Separating Trota from "Trotula"
"Trotta" or "Trocta" are the only forms of this common woman's name found in Salernitan sources of the 12th century; "Trotula", in contrast, is never documented as a woman's name. In the later 12th century, part of the work associated with the historic medical practitioner, Trota of Salerno, the De curis mulierum ("On Treatments for Women"), was subsumed into a compendium of three different works on women's medicine by three different authors. Since Trota's work was the only one of the three that bore an author's name, she was credited with the whole ensemble, which was initially dubbed with the title the Trotula, the "little (work of) Trota". As the ensemble began to circulate outside of southern Italy, the title "Trotula" was soon misunderstood as an author's name, and “Trotula” came to be seen as the singular author of all three texts in the Trotula ensemble.
Whatever of Trota's fame endured beyond the 12th century seems to have been fused with the textual persona "Trotula". In contrast to the wide popularity of the Trotula texts—which are found in nearly 140 extant copies of the Latin originals, and about 60 copies of vernacular translations—the authentic works of Trota survive in only a handful of copies. Hence, in modern scholarship, it is crucial to separate the historical woman Trota from the fate of the Trotula texts, because their historical importance and impact were quite distinct. and Monica H. Green (2008) Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Premodern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press) esp. chapters 1, 5, and 6. 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".
Life and works No independent biographical information on Trota of Salerno exists beyond information that can be gleaned from writings associated with her. That information allows us to place her sometime in the first half of the 12th century. Additionally, a comprehensive concordance of all textual witnesses to Trota's writings and practices, published in 2007, allows an estimation of the full scope of her work. It is likely that she wrote more than can yet be documented by extant witnesses.Monica H. Green (2007) “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale 'La Scuola medica Salernitana', 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo) , pp. 200–07; and Monica H. Green (2008) Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press) , especially chap. 1. In the 12th and 15th centuries, the Trota's texts were repeatedly published in various cities and had a broad audience throughout western Europe despite the competition of other texts focusing on gynecology and women's health.
She also promoted ways of living a healthy and long life. She advocated the incorporation of exercise, good diet, low stress, and cleanliness into daily living. Trotula also wrote content on how to take care of personal hygiene and care, including lessons about make-up and suggestions on how to stay unwrinkled, remove puffiness from the face and eyes, remove unwanted hair from the body, lighten the skin, hide blemishes and freckles, clean teeth and take away bad breath, dye hair, remove hair by waxing, and care for lips and gums.
Practica secundum Trotam (Practical Medicine According to Trota) 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.Monica H. Green (2007) "Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno," in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale 'La Scuola medica Salernitana', 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo) , pp. 185–88 and 211–13; and Trota was a famous authority on obstetrics and a renowned midwife in Salerno. Although her works are known for their practical information on gynecology and obstetrics, Trota also wrote on medical problems faced by both men and women. In her practical book of medicine, Practica Secundum Trotum, she dedicated about three quarters of the text to ailments that are not specific to women, such as internal diseases, fevers, and wounds. This illustrates that Trota was not limited to problems in gynecology or obstetrics when treating her patients.
Trota's writings included radical ideas that were not common in that time, claiming that both men and women were responsible for failure in conception. This daring statement that questioned a man's ability to reproduce caused a lot of controversy about her work. Her work also included a variety of advice on conception, menstruation, caesarian sections, and childbirth. Most of her texts were written for male doctors to educate themselves about the female body since all the works at the time were written by men who had no experience with treating women and their medical issues. These written works were used centuries after they were published, as they paved the way to the pre-modern treatment towards women's medical issues.
The Practica was first discovered in 1985 by California Institute of Technology historian John F. Benton. Benton found the text in a Madrid manuscript likely written at the very beginning of the 13th century. A second, partial copy of the text was discovered by Monica H. Green in a manuscript now in Oxford.Monica H. Green (2007) “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale 'La Scuola medica Salernitana', 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo) , p. 187. In 1995, Piero Cantalupo published a complete transcription of the original Latin text in the Madrid manuscript; no complete translation into English has yet been published.Piero Cantalupo, “L'inedito opuscolo di pratica terapeutica della medichessa salernitana Trota. La Practica secundum Trotam: Testo, traduzione, appendici e glossario,” Bollettino storico di Salerno e Principato Citra 13, nos. 1-2 (1995), 1–104. Cf. Monica H. Green (2007) "Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno," in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale 'La Scuola medica Salernitana', 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo) , pp. 185–88, 211–13.
De curis mulierum (On Treatments for Women) Trota is also the authoritative figure behind one of three texts in the so-called Trotula ensemble, a compendium of works on women's medicine brought together later in the 12th century.Monica H. Green, ed. and trans. (2001) The 'Trotula': A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) (ebook) (print) 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"). As the text explains, sometimes women "take in wind" into their uterus, "with the result that to certain people they look as if they were ruptured or suffering from intestinal pain." Trota was called in to treat a woman suffering from the condition. The text stressed that "Trota was called in as if she were a master." The Latin word for "master" here is in the feminine form, magistra, the most compelling sign that Trota had a social stature comparable to that of male magistri.Monica H. Green (2007) “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale 'La Scuola medica Salernitana', 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo) , p. 213.
This treatment of "wind" in the uterus has no other parallel with known works coming out of Salerno. But much of the rest of the text of De curis mulierum has strong echoes of practices of Trota's known from the Practica secundum Trotam.