Medicine

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The earliest hand copied medical textbooks Practia Brevia and De compositione Medicamentorum that passed between doctors, generation after generation were written by Trotulla, a famous female physician at the Salerno school of Medicine in Italy. She taught her male colleagues about female physiology, wrote a book on Diseases of Women and advocated pediatrics as a special branch of medicine. She promoted cleanliness, exercise, balanced diet and stress avoidance for maintaining health. The surgical techniques and diagnostic methods she taught were used for centuries. Hostility towards women led to denial of her very existence and her name was misquoted as male Trottus by some Historians. Salerno was sacked by Henry VI in 1094 and Trotulla died in 1097. Trotulla's own books were scattered and lost. With the advent of modern medicine and hospitals (an invention of Florence Nightingale), women were marginalized and pushed out of mainstream medicine totally as herbalists, healers and midwives.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was by far the most extraordinary mathematician of the 18th century. By the age of twenty she started writing Analytical Institutions as a mathematics textbook for her brothers. When her work was published in 1748, it caused a sensation in the academic world for being a model of clarity and systematic interpretation of the work of various mathematicians. Maria Agnesi is best known for the curve, ironically called the Witch of Agnesi.

Sophie Germain, a French revolutionary decided to study mathematics at the age of 13, after reading the legend of Archimedes' death. Sophie's family, although wealthy tried to dissuade her from the study of math but gave up seeing Sophie's passion for math. Germain is best known for her work on Game theory and the modern theory of elasticity, without which construction of high rise Skyscraper would have been inconceivable. Using her theory Eiffel Tower was erected, but she did not make it to the acknowledgement list of 72 people inscribed on this wonder.

Emy Amalie Noether (1882-1935) of Germany developed the basis of group theory, which is the mathematics behind representation of all modern physics. She was not permitted to hold a paid position, so she researched and taught without pay in German universities. It was her work in the theory of invariants, which led to formulations for several concepts of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Later she worked on ideal theory in abstract algebra, with special attention to rings, groups, and fields. Modern algebra owes much to her work. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence that Einstein's received assistance from his own first wife Mileva Maric , who was a brilliant mathematician and a physicist.
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