John of Salisbury, one of the most learned men of the twelfth century, gives an account of the state of medicine in that period, which is very suggestive. “The professors of the theory of medicine are very communicative; they will tell you all they know, and, perhaps, out of their great kindness a little more. From them you may learn the nature of all things, the causes of sickness and of health, how to banish the one and how to preserve the other; for they can do both at pleasure. They will describe to you minutely the origin, the beginning, the progress, and the cure of all diseases. In a word, when I hear them harangue, I am charmed; I think them not inferior to Mercury or Æsculapius, and almost persuade myself that they can raise the dead. There is only one thing that makes me hesitate. Their theories are as directly opposite to one another as light and darkness. When I reflect on this, I am a little staggered. Two contradictory propositions cannot both be true. But what shall I say of the practical physicians? I must say nothing amiss of them. It pleaseth God, for the punishment of my sins, to suffer me to fall too frequently into their hands. They must be soothed, and not exasperated. That I may not be treated roughly in my next illness, I dare hardly allow myself to think in secret what others speak aloud.”
In another work, however, the writer delivers himself with greater freedom. Speaking of newly-fledged medicos, he says: “They soon return from college, full of flimsy theories, to practise what they have learned. Galen and Hippocrates are continually in their mouths. They speak aphorisms on every subject, and make their hearers stare at their long, unknown, and high-sounding words. The good people believe that they can do anything, because they pretend to all things. They have only two maxims which they never violate: never mind the poor, never refuse money from the rich.”
Robert of Gloucester[738] does not write very highly of the skill in surgery possessed by the Anglo-Normans. Speaking of the Duke of Austria, who took King Richard the First prisoner, his verses import that when “he fell off from his horse and sorely bruised his foot, his physicians declared that if it was not immediately smitten off, he would die; but none would undertake the performance of the operation; till the Duke took a sharp axe, and bid the chamberlain strike it off, and he smote thrice ere he could do it, putting the Duke to most horrid torture. And Holinshed tells us that in the time of Henry the Third there lived one Richard, surnamed Medicus, ‘a most learned physician, and no less expert in philosophy and mathematics;’ but makes not the least mention of surgery. Also some authors have attributed the death of Richard the First (wounded in the shoulder at the Castle of Chalezun), to the unskilfulness of those who had the care of the wound, and not from the quarrel’s being poisoned, as others have insinuated.”[739]
The university title of Doctor was not known in England before the reign of Henry II.[740]
Richard Fitz-Nigel, Bishop of London, was apothecary to Henry II. Many bishops and dignitaries of the Church were physicians to kings and princes.[741] Most of the practitioners of medicine and teachers of physic were churchmen, either priests or monks.
St. Hildegard (1098-1179), Abbess of Ruppertsberg, near Bingen on the Rhine, was a famous physician and student of nature, who wrote a treatise on Materia Medica. Her pharmacy was in advance of her time, and to this eminent lady physician we are indebted for the attempts to disguise the nastiness of physic; she enveloped the remedy in flour, which was then made into pancakes and eaten.[742] Meyer says that her work entitled Physica “is a treatise on Materia Medica, unmistakably founded on popular traditions.” Her visions and revelations concerning physical and medical questions are contained in her work “Divinorum operum simplicis hominis liber.” She was a true reformer within the Church, and her pure life was singularly devoted and unselfish; she was, in fact, a Woman Physician, who should be the patron saint of our lady doctors.
CHAPTER V.
THE SCHOOL OF SALERNO.
The Monks of Monte Cassino.—Clerical Influence at Salerno.—Charlemagne.—Arabian Medicine gradually supplanted the Græco-Latin Science.—Constantine the Carthaginian.—Archimatthæus.—Trotula.—Anatomy of the Pig.—Pharmacopœias.—The Four Masters.—Roger and Rolando.—The Emperor Frederick.
The connecting link between the ancient and the modern medicine was the school of Salerno. It is true that Hippocrates and Galen in Arabian costume re-entered Europe after a long absence in the East, when the Moors occupied a great part of Spain; but great as was this Saracenic influence on medical science, it was not to be compared with the powerful and permanent influence secured by the native growth of medical science which sprung up on Italian soil.