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Updated: June 5, 2025
This had been a Greek colony in the olden time and continued to be known for many centuries after the Christian era as Magna Græcia. Greek medicine, then, had more influence here than anywhere else. As a matter of fact, the beginnings of Salernitan teaching are all Greek and not at all Arabian. This is as true in surgery as in medicine.
I have quoted Gurlt in the chapter on "Great Surgeons of the Medieval Universities," insisting that the Salernitan school owed nothing at all to Arabian surgery. Salernitan medicine was, during the twelfth century, just as free from Arabian influence. It led especially to an oversophistication of medicine from the standpoint of drug therapeutics. The Arabian physicians trusted nature very little.
Without the devotion of so ardent a scholar it would have been almost impossible for us to have attained so complete a picture of Salernitan activities. As it is, as a consequence of his work we are able to see this first of modern medical schools developing very much as do our most modern medical schools.
It is simple and straightforward and does not profess to be other than it is, though it must be set down as the first reasonably complete contribution to comparative anatomy. When their surgery came to be written down, however, it gave abundant evidence of the thoroughness with which this department of medicine had been cultivated by the Salernitan faculty.
In this they were like our forefathers of medicine one hundred years ago, of whom Rush was the typical representative so history repeats itself. Before the introduction of Arabian medicine the Salernitan school of medicine was noted for its common-sense methods and its devotion to all the natural modes of healing. It looked quite as much to the prevention of disease as its treatment.
Salerno, at the end of the twelfth century, had already reached its highest point of advance in medicine and was beginning to decline. Decadence was evident in so far as all the medical works that we have from that time are either borrowings or imitations from Arabian medicine with which eventually Salernitan medical literature became confounded.
We have already seen in the chapter on Salerno that Arabian influence did harm to Salernitan medical teaching. The school of Salerno itself had developed simple, dietetic, hygienic, and general remedial measures that included the use of only a comparatively small amount of drugs. Its teachers emphasized nature's curative powers.
One thing is sure, the professors were eminently serious, the work taken up was in many ways thoroughly scientific, and some of the results of the medical investigations of that early day are interesting even now. The descriptions of diseases that we have from the Salernitan school are true to nature and are replete with many original observations.
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