Trotula: The Book
I got the book I ordered, and it is now time to explore medieval medicine. However, that’s a tall order, so let’s narrow the field and talk, for now, to a particular very popular text and what it indicates.
And I’m going to keep to just the book, though the text itself is fairly small. There is a lot to unpack when dealing with it.
So, I want start with the easy bit. What is being prescribed for what conditions, what you are going to see, etc.
Format:
We have a short introductory couple of paragraphs in which the writer explains that, ‘by the influence of a certain lady,’ the writer was going to give you Galen and Hippocrates’ solutions for women’s ills. The intro must also explain that, since women were made by God weaker than men and that childbirth adds a bunch of stress to the body, they are more susceptible to illness.
Also, you are told that you are in humoral territory: women are wet and cold, and men are hot and dry. Extrapolate from there.
Menses Fixation
The book returns a few times to inducing women to menstruate more or to stop menstruating, but the first couple pages are given to cures for this in specific. This has to do with the humors. If you don’t menstruate regularly, you will get an excess of heat and develop a condition that frankly sounds like diabetes. Menstruate too much and you get jaundiced and emaciated from the lack of cold.
Ok, I can’t give every recommendation for every condition, but here are a few samples.
For people who aren’t menstruating, bleeding from the left foot and then the right, and another treatment calls for cooking in wine mugwort, pennyroyal, sea wormwood, and some other powder.
Scarification and coitus were also suggestions for not menstruating enough.
A condition in which the womb moved (the author seems to mean tilting from its place like a deflating balloon) was claimed to cause pain on the left side, difficulty peeing, your period to stop, and limbs to contort. (I have no medical training, but that sounds like a liver issue to me.) Anyway, the way to deal with this tilting womb was to ground agaric, great plantain seed, savory seed, and serve in wine.
Conception Specifics
Next section was about treating infertility.
Here’s some news: both men and women could be infertile. To test which of the couple is infertile, each person should get their own cup of bran and pee in it. Worms will appear in the cup of person who is infertile.
The reasons The Trotula gives for women being infertile are too fat, too thin, and a slippery womb.
Now, according to this book, there are women who should not conceive because their vaginas are too narrow and their wombs too constricted. Recognizing such women can’t always avoid sex, the author recommends being exposed to jet stone, carrying the womb of a goat that had never had kids against the naked skin, or castrating a weasel and keeping the weasel’s testicles against your bosom.
If it’s a case of wanting to space out your kids, put in your afterbirth as many grains of barley that you want years between births.
However, if you are trying to conceive, try drinking boar testicles in wine and then having sex after your period.
If you are a big girl who is trying to have kids and you are phlegmatic, try bathing in an herbal bath involving rainwater and seawater. Then go to bed and hide under the blankets.
Pregnancy and Childbirth
There are many suggestions here since the author seems to believe that a soul gets more attached to a fetus as it grows and that this is what cements it to the womb, so in the early weeks any little jostle could terminate the pregnancy. In order to avoid this, the pregnant woman shouldn’t see anything she can’t have, since craving something and not getting it will cause a miscarriage.
If the mother is struggling to give birth, she should take a bath and then be fumigated with spikenard.
A male doctor attending the birth is enjoined to not look at the mother’s face or privates, lest he embarrass her. This injunction is immediately followed by instructions to the midwife that if the infant isn’t presenting correctly, she should grease up her hands and turn the baby.
For a dead fetus that isn’t expelled from the body, put the mom on a linen sheet and then have four men at each corner of the sheet yank her back and forth.
Baby Care
The next logical section is on baby care. Takes up considerably less space than everything else, but in case you were wondering, you need to flatten the kid’s ears a bunch.
Also, your wet nurse should have ample but not too large breasts, clear coloring, and be a little plump. She should be kept on a diet that isn’t too salty or spicy and should avoid garlic above all else. If the kid develops diarrhea, the wet nurse should eat constipating food. Don’t wean in the summer but do it in an orderly manner once the kid can eat poultry.
Also, dangle pearls in front of the kid’s face, and the maid should anoint their tongue with honey if they are slow to talk.
A couple paragraphs are then devoted to ways that someone who is not a virgin can appear to be one on her wedding night. This includes applying leaches to the affected part, though she can also try natron.
Other Conditions
Strangury, a condition of trying to pee but it hurts and is hard, is described as happening in both sexes but treated differently. I didn’t know what strangury meant when I read it originally and thought they meant kidney stones, since some of the remedies suggested wiggling a stone free.
You can treat pubic lice with ashes and oil. If the lice are around the eyes, grind bacon up with aloe, white lead, and frankincense and apply to the swelling.
Anus protrusion in both sexes can be treated by fermenting the effected part with wormwood wine, and then applying a plaster of ink and willow ash.
There are also remedies for bedwetting, scabies, cancer, nose cancer, (they recommend washing it out with green copper and cumin) and dysentery. They also have a sunburn remedy that involves white lead.
Hemorrhoids and swelling testicles get their own remedies.
Cosmetics
This goes under adornments, and focuses mainly on whitening your skin, removing hair, and dying your hair. Though you can also remove wrinkles and freckles.
I think I have covered ways to dye your hair black or golden already, but if you need a depilatory, you could try a mixture of quicklime and orpiment.
There are dozens of ways to whiten the face, but some of the better suggestions include covering the face with oil of tartar, reducing sowbread to powder and then covering your face with it, and washing your face with juice made of white and red byrony, white lead, juice of sowbread, ginger and frankincense.
To color your lips, you can rub them with the bark of a root of a nut tree, put cotton on your teeth and gums, and then paint them with something called composite color, which is a substance made of some marine herb with egg white and brazilwood.
A whole section is given over to fixing fissures in the lips and then another section goes to whitening teeth. My favorite suggestion is to whiten teeth by washing your mouth with wine after dinner, wipe the teeth dry with a new cloth, then chew fennel, lovage, or parsley.
Thoughts on Formulas
I didn’t give you full directions here, but the book is explicit. If it is something you will drink or eat, measurements tend to be given. If it is something you bathe in or smear on the skin, the amounts tend to be dropped.
I tell you something: the presence of orpiment, a paint that has arsenic in it, and white lead, have me a little worried about some of these recipes. Credit where credit is due, however, these items tend to be in small amounts and aren’t generally followed by the instructions “smear all over and gobble.”
General Observations
It has a similar vibe to The Washing Away of Wrongs in that it repeats itself: treatments for prolapsed wombs appear in three different places as well as treatments for out-of-control menstruation and dispelling afterbirth or a dead fetus. A treatment for constipation shows up in the middle of the menses section and then a different remedy for constipation is given in the other conditions section.
Where it is different is the inconsistency of voice. At one point, Trotula is described in the third person applying a bath to a patient. Sometimes the reader is addressed as ‘we,’ and other times the writer refers to a treatment as something ‘I’ did.
Overall, it has the feeling of a collection of notes slapped together over the years and not subsequently edited. This could be down to the translation, but I suspect that it could also be from several people writing the original over a span of years.
I appreciate the flexibility in treatments. There are always a couple of options that a medicus or patient might try. I also like the lack of astrological nonsense or faffing about with theories. Just a quick inro and then straight into ‘treat x with y.’
Something I got a chuckle out of is how much this book seems to assume that the patient is wealthy. I mean, dangle a pearl in front of a kid? You just have a pearl on hand, right? This assumption may explain why some of the recipes are complex. The reader is supposed to have servants to do much of the work.
There is surprisingly little in the way of religious ritual, despite the book ending with ‘Amen’ and starting with references to God’s aid. There is a mantra about Jesus’s suffering that you are supposed to say when you cut the infant’s umbilical cord, but that’s the extent of the religious mentions. I guess I was expecting more prayers after the post I wrote about the birth girdle.
This particular edition has an appendix of medicines mentioned, but I wanted to convey what the average person would have read at the time.
We will get to context and history of The Trotula another time.