Trota of Salerno

Trota of Salerno (also spelled Trocta) was a medical practitioner and medical writer in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno who lived sometime in the early or middle decades of the 12th century. Her fame spread as far away as France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries. Thereafter, aside from a distorted reflection of her work that lived on in the Trotula treatises, her work was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 20th century.

In the later 12th century, part of the work associated with the historical Trota of Salerno, the De curis mulierum ("On Treatments for Women"), was subsumed into the Trotula ensemble, a compendium of three different works on women's medicine by three different authors. The title "Trotula" ("the little (work of) Trota") 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, which became the most widely disseminated and translated works on women’s medicine in later medieval Europe. The authentic works of Trota, in contrast, survive in only a handful of copies. Whatever survived of her fame beyond the 12th century seems to have been fused with the textual persona "Trotula." In modern scholarship, therefore, it is important to separate the historical woman Trota from the fate of the Trotula texts, because their historical importance and impact were quite distinct. 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."

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 twelfth century. Trota is associated as author or source with several different works: De passionibus mulierum ante in et post partum, De ornatu mulierum and Practica secundum Trotam.

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. 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.

...
Wikipedia