Salerno's medical school and the Trotula

Salerno, a trading city south of Naples, had Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants and was frequented by merchants from the Islamic world. Its medical school drew scholars of several cultures; legend said it had been founded by four doctors, one Jewish, one Greek, one Arab and one Christian. Constantine the African, the best-known translator of Arabic medical books into Latin, began his work at Salerno; from about 1076 he translated at the monastery of Monte Cassino. By the middle of the 12th century Salernitan teaching combined Greek, Latin and Arabic texts with local practice, and in the 13th century its texts entered university curricula.

Salernitan physicians wrote practical notebooks called practica. The Articella, a collection of works by Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Hippocrates, Galen, Theophilos and Philaretos in Latin, became the most popular medical textbook of the late Middle Ages; it was long attributed to Salerno, though a Parisian origin has recently been argued.

Three Salernitan works on women's health were copied again and again: On the Conditions of Women, On the Treatments for Women and On Women's Cosmetics. Tradition credited them to a woman named Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine at Salerno. In her 2001 edition, the first of the Latin text since the 16th century, the historian Monica Green showed that the Trotula is three independent works by different authors. The second derives from the work of a Salernitan woman healer named Trota; the other two were probably written by men. All three mix the practices of southern Italy with theories and medicines newly arrived from the Arabic world.

Trota is the only known woman writer of the Salernitan school. The spread of her writings shows that by the 12th century Salernitan medicine had readers as far away as England and Normandy. A standardized form of the Trotula, put together in the mid-13th century, circulated widely in learned circles.