If Virdimura rhymes with care

Sicily, 1376. The unthinkable happens: a woman with a bizarre name, Virdimura, is allowed to be a doctor. In the middle of the Middle Ages, a seemingly insurmountable prohibition was overcome and a right was established that would open all the doors of medicine. It certifies it license to care of 7 November of that year preserved in the State archives of Palermo, a few revolutionary lines in the history of women.

Who is Virdimura? How did you learn the art of care? How did you convince the commission examining you to go beyond prejudice and evaluate based on preparation and results? Simona Lo Iacono, Sicilian, already author of women’s stories of redemption (The tiger of Noto2021; Anna’s story, 2022), tells the story of the protagonist’s life, taking us into the Catania of those years, «a tangle of merchants, companies of adventurers, men-at-arms, master executioners», where Jews – in the Giudecca ghetto – coexisted with Muslims, Arabs and Christians. Virdimura was also Jewish, the green of the moss and the strength of the city walls identify her in her name. Her hair is red and rebellious like her nature, supported by her father Urìa. An enlightened man, he is a doctor and the only point of reference for his daughter (who did not know her mother, who died in childbirth). It is he who teaches her everything, who transmits the theoretical and operational knowledge of medicine to her. To make them understand that their ability and humanity are aimed at anyone, without distinctions of religion, ethnicity or wealth. The last, the sick on the margins of society, the prostitutes, the lepers, those who have no money (at the time they could only be assisted for a fee) actually have priority in their home close to the sea, which soon takes on the appearance of a hospital. Urìa recommends his daughter to listen, to abandon preconceptions, to help the patient process the pain.

Virdimura learns day after day the names of pathologies and the remedies to combat them, studies the internal organs of the human body, becomes familiar with instruments, becomes capable of disinfecting, bandaging, suturing wounds and handling forceps. She absorbs her father’s layered knowledge, recognizing the virtues of different plants, using their extracted benefits. She is attentive to the humiliation and suffering of violated women, who need plastic surgery to reconstruct their hymen, under penalty of being branded for life and condemned to expulsion from society. The episodes multiplied after, in 1322, Pope John XXII had launched the interdict on King Frederick III’s Sicily, preventing the faithful from accessing the sacraments: there were many cases of Catholic women who were victims of abuse, dishonored brides-to-be who entrusted themselves to Virdimura for the surgery, finding an interlocutor who they can trust and from whom they feel understood.

The violence of the superstition rooted in the culture of the time exploded with the typhus epidemic whose symptoms Master Urìa had recognised, trying – in vain – to warn the community. It’s easier not to believe him, worse, to attribute the cause of that apocalypse to him, he judged, who persists in caring for outcasts and dedicates himself to who knows what occult magic. A distrust that in a few days, while the contagion spreads, turns into fury: a handful of survivors attack the hospital-house, destroy everything, overturn the beds, break the instruments, burn the books with years of notes and research, they break the vases. When Virdimura comes out of the hiding place where she was saved, she no longer finds her father, taken away by the attackers. On the doorstep there are “chicken legs tied with garlic threads. An amulet against witches.”

Finding strength and motivation to get up, now alone, seems impossible. But rebuilding, without giving in to despair, is like offering assistance to the derelict: you have to do it knowing only that it is the right thing. Virdimura, with perseverance, slowly puts the structure back on its feet. She mainly takes care of women, then instructs them, shares medical knowledge and practices with them, and together they cultivate the garden. «We were a group of exiled and betrayed, displaced and abused. Nothing united us, not blood, not education, or religion. The Jews lived together with the Christians and they spoke dialect or Arabic indifferently. (…) We set up a poor, and therefore rich, house of august doctors, in which no doctor was more important than the patient.”