Born: Unknown, Italy (assumed)
Died: Unknown
Country most active: Italy
Also known as: Trocta, Trotula
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Trota of Salerno was one of the most well-known physicians of the 12th century and is considered the world’s first gynaecologist. She wrote several medical works, including De curis mulierum (“On Treatments for Women”), made up of 63 chapters on medical concerns of the female body. The goal of this book was to educate male physicians, who were woefully ignorant. Arguably, they were still less ignorant than the historians and medical professionals who, in following centuries, assumed Trota was a man based solely on the reasoning that a woman could not have authored such influential medical texts. Some even doubted that she existed at all, despite the clear evidence of her legacy. In the 1500s, Casper Wolf edited her works, deliberately changing the name from Trotula to the male name Eros and changing the verb forms from feminine to masculine to match. Even when historian John F. Benton uncovered the evidence of the real-life Trota in the 1980s, he continued to insist that there was no connection to her work and they were all written by men.