The medieval skincare routine according to the formulations of Madgistra Trotula and the Medical School of Salerno and its reflection on cosmetology of the third millennium.

BACKGROUND: Officinal plants, minerals, animal derivatives, and miscellaneous have always been used to treat and improve appearance despite the different aesthetic canons of a specific historical and cultural context. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this work was to make a critical comparison between medieval and modern dermocosmetics analyzing the works of Trotula de Ruggiero, a female doctor of the 11th century teaching and working inside the illustrious "Medical School of Salerno," who devoted particular attention to the promotion of female care, beauty, and well-being. METHODS: We applied the historical-critical method analyzing the Latin text and the nglish translation of the standardized corpus of the main Trotula medieval manuscript De Ornatu Mulierum with a multidisciplinary scientific approach ranging from botany to pharmaceutical chemistry and technology, pharmacology and pathology. RESULTS: We identified the medicinal plants, derivatives of animal origin and minerals used in the recipes of Trotula, highlighting their biological properties in the light of current scientific knowledge. A critical comparison between medieval and modern dermocosmetics is reported also taking into consideration the chemical, pharmaceutical, and technological literature. CONCLUSION: Beyond the obvious changes in the paradigms of cosmetology and the different beauty canons of Middle Age with respect to modern times, our results emphasize the attention of Trotula to female care, beauty and well-being as well as the extraordinary combination of tradition and modernity in her work.

Boguslawa Keckova: An Official Female Doctor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1893-1911.

The purpose of this paper is to bring to light the biographical details, the professional work and the publishing activities of Boguslawa Keckova (Bohuslava Kecková in Czech and Keck in German), who functioned as an Austro-Hungarian health officer in Mostar from 1893 to 1911 during the period of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). Keckova, who came from Prague, was the second of nine female physicians to be employed by the Austro-Hungarian authorities between 1892 and 1918. Keckova contributed significantly to the improvement of public health and hygiene in BH, especially by organising the medical treatment of Muslim women. She published a series of popular medical articles, both in Czech and in Bosnian. Her medical articles in the Mostar newspaper, 'Osvit', were among the first in BH to promote public health education and aimed at improving the health of the population. In the Czech Republic, 'Bohuslava Kecková' is renowned for being the first Czech female physician to graduate, who, due to Austria's conservativism and anti-feminism, had been forced to study and practise abroad. After Keckova's efforts to have her Swiss MD degree (1880) recognised in Austria failed in 1882, she acquired an Austrian midwife's diploma and established a maternity home in Prague. In 1892, she accepted the invitation to serve as an Austro-Hungarian female health officer in Mostar, where she initialised and popularised the utilisation of public health among (Muslim) women. CONCLUSION: Boguslawa Keckova's work as a physician, medical writer and health educator, which she continued tirelessly until her death in 1911, was based on gender-specific socialmedical concepts, which were at the core of the contemporary Czech feminist movement.

Women in surgery. Myth, history, actuality.

This work synthetically documents the history of women's efforts to be professionally acknowledged as surgeon. The examined timeline goes back from ancient civilizations to our days. It highlights the difficulties that women have had in time, particularly in the last two centuries, trying to make their aspirations come true and their will in becoming surgeons. The attention goes to the difficulties that are faced in our time regarding the medical field and the academic career. Moreover, corrective organizational and behavioural advice is given to solve specific problems still actual, in order to promote sex equality and working collaboration.

[Study on female doctors in Xin'an District in the Ming and Qing Dynasties].

The Xin'an female doctors in the Ming and Qing Dynasties could be divided into 4 categories: viz., those who provide general medical services for women patients; those who provide supplementary services for delivery women; those who serve as an assistant of their practicing husband; and those who continued to practice medicine after their husband's death. Although the latter two types could be respected by their families and praised by the society, these female medical practitioners were undervalued and overlooked generally in the society where males were the main body of the medical circle and, moreover, they were not well educated, as well as the influence of Confucianist thoughts of "honorable men and humble women" , hence, their deeds were rarely seen in historical records. However, the emergence of female doctors had certain social causes, and their contributions to local health care should not be ignored.

The history of women in dermatology.

In the past and present, the status of men is often superior to women in most developing countries and it has a negative effect on the social development of these countries. If women are educated as men in a society, then this society can advance rapidly since the effect of educated women influence the quality of life and health in a positive way and not only for those women, but younger generations who follow them as well. This article reviews the history of some remarkable women in dermatology.

CHRONICLE OF THE "ANGLO-YUGOSLAV CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL" IN SREMSKA KAMENICA.

As a peacetime work of Katherine S. Macphail (Glasgow, 1887- St.Andrews, 1974) MB ChB (Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery), the Anglo-Serbian Children's Hospital in Belgrade was established after World War I, and the English-Yugoslav Children's Hospital for Treatment of Osteoarticular Tuberculosis was founded in Sremska Kamenica in 1934. Situated on the Fruska Gora slope, the hospital-sanatorium was a well-equipped medical institution with an operating theatre and x-ray machine providing very advanced therapy, comparable to those in Switzerland and England: aero and heliotherapy, good quality nourishment, etc. In addition, school lessons were organized as well as several types of handwork as the work-therapy. It was a privately owned hospital but almost all the children were treated free of cost. The age for admission was up to 14. During the period from 1934 to 1937, around 458 children underwent hospital treatment, most of them with successful results. During the war years the Sanatorium was closed but after the war it was reactivated. In 1948 by the act of final nationalization of all medical institutions in the communist Yugoslavia, the hospital was transformed into a ward of orthopedic surgery under the supervision of the referent departments in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Today, hospital is out of work and deprived of its humanitarian mission. The building is neglected and in ruins although it has been proclaimed the national treasure by the Regional Institute for Protection of Monuments of Culture.

[The path of creating TCM female periodicals in the Republican period].

A"special issue of female physicians" was included in the 1934 Kunghwa Medical Journal. In 1939, Qian Bao-hua, together with a batch of female TCM professional medical workers, inaugurated a "Chinese Feminine Physicians" included in the "Journal of Column of Traditional Chinese Medicine". The former one was published independently in 1941, only for 8 issues and was suspended in the same year. In the Republican period, the 7 years of running the TCM periodicals by the female physicians was the miniature of the campaign of feminine rights in the TCM field from heat to cold, from foolish through confidence to self-realization. As the only extant TCM periodical, the Chinese Feminine Physicians run by females in the upper half of the 20th century, the basic cause of its failure may lie on the wrong evaluation of its audiences.

Biography as an art form: the story of Helen Flanders Dunbar, M.D., Ph.D., B.D., and Med. Sci. D.

Helen Flanders Dunbar (1902-1959) was a physician, medieval and Renaissance scholar, theologian, and founder of the American Psychosomatic Society and its journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Her contributions are not currently well known but deserve recognition from all those involved or interested in the dialogue between medicine and spirituality. This essay explores Dunbar's personal history and professional achievements. It focuses particular attention on a feminist perspective regarding her life and work. It will conclude with a discussion of how biography, as an art form, transforms both author and audience. This essay was originally presented as the Second Annual J.R. Williams Memorial Lecture on Spirituality and Medicine at the Tulane School of Medicine in fall 2013.

Women: medicine, their kidneys, and nephrology.

As an act of compassion, the art of caring for the sick has always depended on women. As a practical tradition of healing skills, the "wise" and "old" women of antiquity were the original founders of what would ultimately become medicine. Throughout the subsequent millennia that it took for the gradual transformation of the healing skills from a craft to a profession, women continued to contribute to its progress and development. Unfortunately, recorded history has marginalized much of their fundamental contributions because most extant and investigated medical texts of the past were authored by men. As medicine began to embrace the basic sciences and became a university-based and regulated profession, rules excluding women from entry into the profession were made stricter and more rigorously enforced. It is only in the latter half of the 19th century that, in the footsteps of the growing feminine movement, women were admitted to medical schools, and in the 20th century that they began to contribute in earnest to the science of medicine. This article recounts this progress and highlights how it affected our knowledge of kidney disease in women and the enlarging role of women in the relatively new discipline of nephrology.

[Designation of occupation and proper name--onomastical considerations on the early Christian inscription of Sarmanna medica from Gondorf on the River Mosel]. / Berufsbezeichnung und Eigenname--onomastische Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Inschrift der Sarmanna medica aus Gondorf an der Untermosel.

Some time ago, the author published some hypotheses regarding the etymological roots of the name Sarmanna which appears in an early Christian epitaph, which may be as old as the 5th century A.D. In this paper, some of these hypotheses will be elaborated upon, based on additional evidence in support of its eastern germanic origin which suggests close semantic links to medica, Sarmanna's profession. This kind of semantic connection seems to be unique among known ancient epitaphs. It thus offers important sociological and historical evidence for processes of acculturation and assimilation also in the medical realm at the transition from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages.

[De secretis mulierum, de chirurgia et de modo medendi libri septem. Neurology and women in mediaeval medical literature]. / De secretis mulierum, de chirurgia et de modo medendi libri septem. Neurología y mujer en la literatura médica medieval.

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS: The School of Salerno stood as a landmark in the teaching and practice of medicine in the Western mediaeval world. Women could be both teachers and students and made significant contributions to its abundant scientific production. One of the most important of such women was Trotula of Salerno, the 12th century author of the Passionibus mulierum curandorum. De secretis mulierum, de chirurgia et de modo medendi libri septem is an anonymous medical poem from the School of Salerno, which was discovered in a manuscript from the 13th century. It consists of seven books and 7280 dactylic hexameters. The first book is specifically devoted to women's diseases and the second is a treaty on cosmetics. Books III and IV deal with surgery and follow the classical a capite ad calcem formula. The seventh book, De modo medendi, deals with therapeutics. We review the references to neurological diseases, using a critical translation of this text to carry out our study. DEVELOPMENT: The poem proposes therapies to treat epilepsy, headache or tinnitus. The treatment to be prescribed for headache differs depending on its origin. It puts forward pathophysiological explanations for the different types of headache, it relates engorged blood vessels with hemicranial headache, and suggests an excess of phlegm as the origin of mild occipital headache. CONCLUSIONS: Neurological pathology is well represented in this mediaeval monograph on women's diseases. Furthermore, it also shows us the vision that the Salerno physician has of these conditions and the therapeutic arsenal (based mainly on medicinal plants) that was available for use.