In more modern times, when almost all learning was garnered into the religious houses, which were not only the libraries but the hospitals of the day, it seems evident that the care of the sick and wounded fell at least as often to the share of the Nunneries as of the Monasteries, and probably medical skill, such as it was, found place among the sisters quite as often as among the brethren of the various religious Orders.
The old ballad of Sir Isumbras gives one illustration out of many of the prevailing state of things, relating how the nuns received the wounded knight, and how
“Ilke a day they made salves new,
And laid them on his wounds,
They gafe hym metis and drynkes lythe,
And heled the knyghte wonder swythe.”[9]
It may be remembered that Sir Walter Scott,[10] after describing how Rebecca “proceeded, with her own hands, to examine and bind up the wounds,” goes on to remark, “The youngest reader of romances and romantic ballads must recollect how often the females, during the dark ages, as they are called, were initiated into the mysteries of surgery.... The Jews, both male and female, possessed and practised the medical science in all its branches.”
In the fourteenth century, when the Medical School of Salerno enjoyed high reputation, we find record of a female physician named Abella, who lived there, and wrote in Latin various works on medicine.[11]