Almost assuredly, Galen was not aware that it would be the strict adherence to …show more content…
They have seen transitions in practitioners and patients, the balance of power move between one group and another. The Trotula, however, has seen and experienced more than most. It empowered a group of women, giving them the tools to give themselves the care they needed, the care that male physicians simply were not interested in. Like any work of literature, its words were reinterpreted, repurposed, for a new audience; this time the male physicians who sought to monitor these female healers and midwives. It was repurposed again, for men studying the female anatomy, when women were no longer permitted to practice. And finally, in the far future, it was cast away, as the advancement of science rendered its teachings obsolete. While their teachings may never again be a part of ‘modern science,’ On the Natural Faculties and The Trotula are invaluable markers in the path that science has taken, bridges ad road signs that historians can follow and trace all the way to the present, and as far back into the past as we can