Physicians were not obliged by the magistrates to determine the nature of rapes on women; all gynecological questions were remanded to midwives. In truth, among all the physicians of antiquity only Hippocrates discussed uterine complaints and Ætius studied obstetrics. It was only in the sixteenth century that midwifery took its place among the medical sciences, thanks to Rhodion, Ambroise Parè, Reif, Rousset, and Guillemeau. Shortly before this time, that is to say, in the fifteenth century, Jacques de Foril published his “Commentaires” on generation, his ideas being derived from Avicenna; his notions, however, were absurd, being wholly based on astrological considerations. He pretended that an infant is not viable in the eighth month, because in the first month the pregnant woman is protected by Jupiter, from whom comes life; and in the seventh month by the moon, which favorizes life by its humidity and light; while in the eighth month or reign of Saturn, who eats children, the influence is hostile. But on the ninth month the benevolent influence of Jupiter is again experienced, and for this reason the infant is more apt to be alive at this period of gestation. To the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages we must attribute the prejudice that, the human body being in direct connection with the universe, especially the planets, it was impossible for physical change to occur without the influence of the constellations. Thus astrology came to be considered as an essential part of medicine. This belief in the influence of the stars came from the Orient, and was carried through Europe after the crusades. As to the treatise on “Diseases of Women,” attributed to Trotula, a midwife of the school of Salerno, it is only a formulary of receipts for the use of women—baths in the sea-sands under a hot sun to thin ladies suffering from overfat; signs by which a good wet-nurse may be recognized: a method of kneading the head, the nose, and the limbs of new-born children before placing them in swaddling clothes; the use of virgin wine mixed with honey as a remedy for removing the wrinkles of old age. “The _Commentaires_ of Bernard de Provincial informs us,” says Daremberg, “that certain practices, not only superstitious but disgusting, were common among the doctrines of Salerno; one, for instance, was to eat themselves, and also oblige their husbands to eat, the excrement of an ass fried in a stove in order to prevent sterility; likewise, to eat the stuffed heart of a diseased sow in order to forget dead friends,” etc.