'TROTULA OF ITALY"

Trotula, (d. 1097) - Physician. In 1000 C.E. the famous medical school at Salerno, in Southern Italy, was founded. It's faculty and student body included both men and women. A most distinguished teacher at this medical university was Trotula. Her husband and sons were also physicians in Salerno. Trotula was interested in managing the diseases and health problems of women. She was a skilled diagnostician who wrote on a wide variety of issues, including caesarean sections, beauty prescriptions, and what a girl who loses her virginity, "by the follies of passion, secret love, and promises," should do. Her work on gynecology was so practical that it was used for hundreds of years. In the fables and stories of Northern Europe she became the fictional character called "Dame Trot."