Trotula of Salerno

Trotula of Salerno is the name attached, from the Middle Ages onward, to a set of three twelfth-century texts on women's medicine compiled in Salerno, Italy, works that became the most widely circulated body of writing on women's health in Latin Europe from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. The name derives from Trota of Salerno, a real physician of Salerno's medical community, but Renaissance editors merged what were originally three separate and probably differently authored texts into a single work attributed to one composite author, Trotula, obscuring the actual history for centuries. Modern scholarship, notably the historian John Benton's 1985 analysis and later work by Monica Green, has worked to separate the historical Trota from the legendary Trotula, while the texts themselves, drawing on both Galenic and newly arriving Arabic medicine, cover childbirth, gynecological conditions, cosmetics and fertility treatment.