Trota of Salerno (also spelled Trocta) was a medical practitioner and writer in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno who lived in the early or middle decades of the 12th century. Her fame spread as far as France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries. A Latin text that gathered some of her therapies (and recounted a cure she had performed) was incorporated into an ensemble of treatises on women's medicine that came to be known as the Trotula, "the little book [called] 'Trotula'". Gradually, readers became unaware that this was the work of three different authors. They were also unconscious of name of the historical writer, which was "Trota" and not "Trotula". The latter was thenceforth misunderstood as the author of the whole compendium. These misconceptions about the author of Trotula contributed to the erasure or modification of her name, gender, level of education, medical knowledge, or the time period in which the texts were written; this trend often resulted from the biases of later scholars. Trota's authentic work (including a collection of her cures, known as the Practical Medicine According to Trota) was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 20th century. Education Trotula of Salerno was educated in the Medical School of Salerno, the world's first medical school. There, she became a highly skilled physician that specialized in a woman's reproductive system and childbirth. Essentially, she became the first gynecologist in the world and later became a professor at the school, gaining the nickname Magistra Medicinae. As a professor, she passed on her knowledge as a gynecologist to her pupils which allowed for them to improve the treatment of women's health in the western world. Separating Trota from "Trotula" "Trotta" or "Trocta" are the only forms of this common woman's name found in Salernitan sources of the 12th century; "Trotula", in contrast, is never documented as a woman's name. In the later 12th century, part of the work associated with the historic medical practitioner, Trota of Salerno, the De curis mulierum ("On Treatments for Women"), was subsumed into a compendium of three different works on women's medicine by three different authors. Since Trota's work was the only one of the three that bore an author's name, she was credited with the whole ensemble, which was initially dubbed with the title, the Trotula, the "little (work of) Trota". As the ensemble began to circulate outside