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. Male doctors controlled the
teaching and theory of women's medicine, and their gynecological
literature incorporated male experience, understanding and learning.
The treatises attributed to Trotula, which survive in nearly 100
manuscripts, were the most popular texts used by academic physicians in
the later Middle Ages.
Although Georg Kraut's Strassburg edition of 1544 treats the
treatises of "Trotula" as a single, unified work, three separate texts
circulated in the Middle Ages, and on stylistic and other grounds it is
likely that each was written by a different author. Reasonably solid
evidence demonstrates the existence of a woman physician at Salerno
named Trota or Trotula, but she was not a magistra (as is often
asserted), and it seems that she did not write even one of the three
texts attributed to her. Instead, she produced a Practica from which
extracts appear in a Practica secundum Trotam, which survives as a
single mansucript in Madrid, and in De aegritudinum curatione in the
Wrociaw (Breslau) Codex Salernitanus.
This paper is to be published by the Bulletin of the History of
Medicine in 1985
