Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook

1981

Medical Storage WZ490 T858

London: Croom Helm

Trota of Salerno, Italy, was an 11th century medical practitioner. Tolerated as a female in the medical world, Trota wrote a treatise focussed on women’s health, specifically for a female audience. Over time, the treatise was copied, translated, and added to, and the extant manuscripts have become known as the ‘Trotula texts’. In the preface of some variations, the translator encourages literate women to read the text to illiterate women, so the knowledge becomes widespread. This book contains an ‘English Trotula’ (Sloane Manuscript 2463), translated from Middle English, and like all Trotula, it covers all kinds of medical conditions specific to women. Here is one of the sixteen explanations, with illustration, on ‘unnatural childbirth’.