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Culture, Power and Personality in Medieval France

John F. Benton

Thomas N. Bisson (ed)

Bloomsbury Academic 1991

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Chapter 19. Trotula, Women’s Problems, and the Professionalization of Medicine in the Middle Ages

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In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the practice of medicine in the Christian West moved from a skill to a profession, with academic training based on authoritative learned literature, with degrees and licenses, and with sanctions against those who practiced medicine without a license. Traditional folk remedies continued to be used, of course, and the actual delivery of babies was exclusively the domain of midwives and female attendants, but increasingly the health-care of well-to-do women was supervised by academically trained physicians. The universities did not, of course, produce enough graduates to fill the medical marketplace, but medical schools nevertheless provided the standards and the concepts which determined the nature of professional practice. Since they were excluded from university education, women were thereby barred from the formal study of medicine and from professorial positions, as well as from the most lucrative medical practice. There were, naturally enough, regional variations in this development, and these generalizations apply more completely in northern Europe than in the south, particularly southern Italy and Spain.