Matthæus Platearius was the son of the above; he composed a Practica Brevis and other books on medicine; it is not certain at what precise date they flourished.
Ægidius “Corbolensis,” canon of Paris, physician to Philip Augustus, king of France (1165-1213), wrote a poem on the decline of Salerno as a medical school; he describes the doctors as caring nothing for books which were not full of recipes, and the professors as merely beardless boys.
The famous but somewhat mysterious “Four Masters” were commentators on the surgery of Roger and Roland.
Musandinus wrote on the diet of the sick; bleeding was recommended for the want of appetite in convalescents, and patients were rather to be purged to death than permitted to die constipated.
Bernard the Provincial recommends wine for the delicate stomachs of bishops; he said they could not bear emetics unless they were administered on a full stomach. His treatise was written between the years 1150 and 1160. He did much to simplify the materia medica of his time, advising the poor not to waste their means on costly foreign drugs, but to gather simples from the fields. It is interesting to find in the thirteenth century police regulations which required in many cities of Italy that physicians should inspect druggists’ shops and see that their medicines were pure and fresh. Pharmacy, it seems, was already becoming divorced from medical practice.[768]
In the middle of the twelfth century there appeared a didactic poem called Schola Salernitana, Flos Medicinæ, or Regimen Sanitatis, or Regimen Virile. This celebrated work went through hundreds of editions.[769]
Dr. Handerson, in his translation of Baas’ History of Medicine, says it had other titles than those given above, as Medicina Salernitana, De Conservanda Bona Valetudine, Lilium Sanitatis, Compendium Salernitanum, etc. The work was for centuries the physician’s vade mecum. It is not known who was the author; originally it was put forth as emanating from “the whole school of Salerno to the king of England,” namely, Robert, son of William the Conqueror, who was cured of a wound at Salerno in 1101. The poem consisted of some two thousand lines. Dr. Handerson gives the following translation of a few lines of this curious work:—
“Salerno’s school in conclave high unites,
To counsel England’s king, and thus indites:
If thou to health and vigour would’st attain,