A Salernitan treatise of about 1200.
Giacosa classed one of the treatises which he published as Salernitan because it was written in a Lombard or Monte Cassino hand of about 1200.[2946]He described its contents as purely therapeutical and regarded its author as showing “a certain repugnance” to the popular remedies and superstitions recommended by other contemporary treatises. Forthis conclusion the chief evidence seems to be a passage where the author, after listing such means to prevent a woman from conceiving as binding her head with a red ribbon or holding the stone found in the head of an ass, says that he thinks that such remedies “operate more by faith than reason.”[2947]But he makes much use of parts of animals and of suffumigations, advising for example on the same page that after conception there should be fumigation with a root of mandragora or peony or the excrement of an ass mixed with flour, an operation which he characterizes asexpertissimum. And on the preceding page, as Giacosa has noted, he recommends a procedure which is even more improbable than it is immoral, whereby patients who show themselves ungrateful to the physician after they have been cured may be made to suffer again.[2948]
The wives of Salerno.
We promised to say something of the female practitioners of Salerno. Trotula is no longer believed to be a woman and we have to judge the women of Salerno mainly by what others say of them. In a commentary of a Master Bernard of Provence, who I suspect may be Bernard Gordon, the medical writer at Montpellier of the closing thirteenth century, are a number of practices attributed to the women of Salerno which Renzi has already brought together.[2949]In these cases the practices are chiefly those employed by the women themselves in child-birth. We may note three from the list that savor strongly of magic. “The women of Salerno cook doves with the acorns which the doves eat; then they remove the acorns from the gizzard and eat them, whence the retentive virtue is much comforted.” “When the women of Salerno fear abortion, they carry with them the pregnant stone,” which our author explains is not the magnet. The other recipe had perhaps better remain untranslated:Stercus asini comedunt mulieres Salernitanae in crispellis et dant viris suis ut melius retineant sperma et sic concipiant. As we shall see in our chapter onArnald of Villanova, another medical writer of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, he condemned the use of incantations in cases of child-birth by old-wives of Salerno but approved of a very similar procedure by which a priest had cured him of warts, and also mentioned favorably the cures wrought by female practitioners at Rome and Montpellier.