As soon as history is studied from the standpoint of the larger human interests and not that of political history, it is easy to find not only traces but detailed stories of feminine education at many times. Before the Renaissance the great phase of education had been that of the universities. The first of the universities was founded down at Salerno around a medical school, the {214} second that of Bologna around a law school and the third that of Paris with a school of philosophy and theology as a nucleus. This seems to be about the way that man's interests manifest themselves in an era of development. First, he is occupied mainly with his body and its needs; then his property and its rights, and finally, as he lifts himself up to higher things, his relations to his fellow-man and to his Creator come to be profound vital interests. Such, at least, is the story of the origin of the universities in the thirteenth century. The surprise for us who are considering the story of feminine education and influence is what happened at Salerno. Here some twenty miles back from Naples, in a salubrious climate, not far from the Mediterranean, where old Greek traditions had maintained themselves, for Southern Italy was called Magna Graecia, where the intercourse with the Arabs and with the northern shores of Africa and with the Near East, brought the medical secrets of many climes to a focus, the first modern medical school came into existence. In the department of women's diseases women professors taught, wrote text-books and evidently were considered, in every sense of the word, co-ordinate professors in the university. We have the text-book of one of them, Trotula, who is hailed as the founder of the Salernitan School of Women Physicians, the word school being used in the same sense as when we talk of a school of {215} painting, and not at all in the sense of our modern women's medical schools. Trotula was the wife of the professor of medicine at the university, Plataerius I, and the mother of another professor at the university, Plataerius II, herself a professor like them. There are many other names of women professors at the University of Salerno in this department. Women, however, were not alone allowed to practise this single phase of medicine, but we have licenses granted to women in Naples, of which at this time Salerno was the university, to practise both medicine and surgery. It seems to have been quite common, I should say, at least as common as in our own time for women to study and practise medicine, and their place in the university and the estimation in which their books were held, show us that all the difficulties in the way of professional education for women had been removed and that they were accepted by their masculine colleagues on a footing of absolute equality.