’Midst fruitful groves her palaces uprear,
Her men are virtuous, and her women fair.”)
It was under the Guiscard’s auspices that the famous school of Medicine that had long been seated at Salerno rose to its highest point of excellence. “Paris for learning, Bologna for law, Orleans for poetry, and Salerno for Medicine”;—such was the verdict of the age. With the somewhat grudging consent of the clergy, the hygienic skill of the dreaded Arabs was in this city permitted to temper the crass ignorance of medieval Italy, and at Salerno alone were the works of the infidel Avicenna and of the pagans Galen and Hippocrates openly studied. The result was that the fame of the doctors of this Fons Medicinae spread over all Western Europe, so that distinguished patients either came hither to be treated in person or else sent emissaries to explain their symptoms and to obtain advice. Nor were the professors of the healing art at Salerno tied down by a strict adherence to drugs and boluses, for they fully realised that the height of all human ambition, the mens sana in corpore sano, is in any case more easily to be obtained by self-control than by all the in[pg 178]gredients of the pharmacopoeia. They were warm believers apparently in the doctrine of moderation in all things, which after all is one of the most valuable prescriptions of modern hygiene:
“Curas tolle graves, irasci crede profanum,
Parce mero, coenato parum, non sit tibi vanum,
Surgere post epulas, somnum fuge meridianum.”
(“Throw off dull care; thine angry moods restrain;
Eschew the wine-cup; lightly eat, nor vain
Deem our advice to make Enough thy feast.
Take exercise, and shun the noon-day rest.”)