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Updated: May 5, 2025
The story of these early Christian women physicians has been touched upon in the chapter on "Medieval Women Physicians," as an introduction to this interesting feature of Salernitan medical education. During the early Christian centuries much was owed to the genius and the devotion to medicine of distinguished Jewish physicians.
Such was the oracular reply of the Salernitan sages to Robert, Duke of Normandy, and no one can dispute the sound common sense of the prescription given, nor doubt that it is applicable to half the patients who to-day throng the consulting rooms of fashionable London physicians.
The date of foundation is uncertain, but Salernitan physicians are mentioned as early as the middle of the ninth century, and from this date until the rise of the universities it was not only a great medical school, but a popular resort for the sick and wounded.
Rebecca Guarna wrote on "Fevers," on the "Urine," and on the "Embryo." The school of Salernitan women came to have a definite place in medical literature. While, as teachers, they had charge of the department of women's diseases, their writings would seem to indicate that they studied all branches of medicine.
The best known of these bear the names Constanza, Calendula, Abella, Mercuriade, Rebecca Guarna, who belonged to the old Salernitan family of that name, a member of which, in the twelfth century, was Romuald, priest, physician, and historian, Louise Trencapilli, and others.
The Salernitan school of surgery drank at the fountain-head of Greek surgery. Apart from Greek sources Roger's book rests entirely upon his own experiences, those of his teachers and his colleagues, and the tradition in surgery that had developed at Salerno. This tradition was entirely from the Greek.
For many centuries portions at least of this Latin medical poem were as common in the mouths of physicians all over Europe as the aphorisms of Hippocrates or the sayings of Galen. Probably this enables us to understand the great reputation that the Salernitan school enjoyed and the influence that it wielded better than anything else.
Salerno was particularly rich in its medical literary products. Very often we have not the names of the writers. Apparently there is good reason to think that a number of the professors consulted together in writing a book, and when it was issued it was considered to be a text-book of the Salernitan school of medicine rather than of any particular professor.
The most important medical writing that comes to us from Salerno, in the sense at least of the work that has had most effect on succeeding generations, has been most frequently transcribed, most often translated and committed to memory by many generations of physicians, is the celebrated Salernitan medical poem on hygiene. The title of the original Latin was "Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum."
In the middle of the thirteenth century some of the better-known Aphorisms were absorbed into a very popular Latin poem that went forth in the name of the medical school of Salerno, though with a false ascription to a yet earlier date. The Salernitan poem, being itself translated into every European vernacular, further helped to bring Hippocrates into every home.
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