Rebecca Guarna and the Practice of Medicine

 Rebecca Guarna, doctor, fl. 1200 (1 April)

Like Trota before her and Costanza Calenda after, Rebecca Guaarna is one of the renowned mulieres Salernitanae ("women of Salerno") who were trained in medicine in that Italian city during the Middle Ages. 

Detail from a manuscript 
illustration of a female healer,
14th century
(MS 544, Miscellanea Medica XVIII,
from Wellcome Collection, London)

A reference to this long tradition was made by Antonio Mazza, prior of the Collegium Medicorum of Salerno, who wrote the earliest history of the institution. In Urbis Salernitanae Historia et Antiquitates (1681), Mazza noted that there had been "many erudite women" who trained at the school, women who "in many fields surpassed or equaled in ingenuity and doctrine not a few men and, like men, were remarkable in the field of medicine." Among the women he names is Rebecca Guarna.

In his multi-volume history of the the Scuola Medica Salernita, historian Salvatore de Renzi notes that, while much about Rebecca Guarna is "unknown" (her dates of birth and death, for example), she belonged a noble and noteworthy family whose members include Archbishop Romualdo Guarna, who had himself studied medicine at Salerno. (Romualdo Guarna died on 1 April 1182, so I've used the date of his death as the occasion to write about Rebecca.) 

Citing Mazza, Renzi lists the medical treatises which Rebecca Guarna is said to have written: De febris (On Fevers), De urinis (On Urines), and De embrione (On Embryos).

In addition to Mazza's reference to Rebecca Guarna and to Renzi's documentary research, she is mentioned by scholars who have written about the history of medicine, and in particular about the history of women in medicine, but there are, unfortunately, no further details. They span the decades: Henry Ebenezer Handerson's The School of Salernum: An Historical Sketch of Medieval Medicine (1883), James J. Walsh's Old Time Makers of Medicine (1911), Melina Lipinska's Les Femmes et le progrès des sciences médicales (1930), Muriel Joy Hughes's Women Healers in Medieval Life and Literature (1943), Kate Campbell Hurd-Meade's A History of Women in Medicine, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1973), and Leigh Whaley's Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800 (2011)

I have been unbelievably excited to discover that there is a street in Salerno named in honor of Rebecca Guarna, the Via Rebecca Guarna. I am including a picture of the street, even though it's from an article with a headline about the "urban degradation" in Salerno! Sure, trees are falling, but THERE IS A STREET NAMED FOR REBECCA GUARNA!!

(Evidently the urban blight seen in Via Rebecca Guarna is a thing, because there are a couple of earlier articles, like this one, with photos of trash everywhere, but I'm still happy.)

Here it is, if you're ever in the area: