The Regimen Salernitanum.
The work most generally known as a characteristic product of the School of Salerno is the Latin poem[2933] which opens with the line, “To the King of the English writes the whole School of Salerno.”[2934] This poem has been variously entitled Schola Salernitana, Regimen Salernitanum, and Flos medicinae. How much more influential and widespread it was than the Practica of Petrocellus may be seen from the fact that manuscripts of the text of the latter are rare, though the introductory letter is more common, and that it was first published by Renzi in the nineteenth century, whereas about one hundred manuscripts and two hundred and fifty printed editions of the poem have been found. It was known chiefly through the brief version of 362 verses, upon which Arnald of Villanova commented at the close of the thirteenth century, until as a result of the researches of Baudry de Balzac, Renzi, and Daremberg the number of lines was increased to 3526. This patchwork from many manuscripts can scarcely be regarded as the work of any one author, time, or even school, and it may be seriously questioned how many of the verses really emanated from Salerno. Certainly it is not free from Arabic influence, since it cites Alfraganus as well as Ptolemy.[2935] Pliny is used a great deal for the virtues of herbs. Much of it sounds like a late versification of commonplaces for mnemonic purposes. Sudhoff has recently pointed out that it was not generally known until the middle of the thirteenth century, before which time Frederick II, the cultured monarch, and Giles de Corbeil, the medical poet, appear unaware of its existence.[2936]
Its superstition.
The brief version of the poem commented upon by Arnald of Villanova naturally contains only one-tenth of the superstition found in the fuller text which is ten times longer. In some respects this brief version might pass as a restrained, though quaint, early set of directions how to preserve health, to which later writers have added superstitious recipes. But as a matter of fact it is too superstitious for even one as hospitable to theories of occult influence as Arnald, who rejects as false and worthless[2937] its assertion that the months of April, May, and September are lunar and that in them consequently fall the days upon which bleeding is prohibited. In the lines upon which Arnald comments marvelous properties are mentioned in the case of the plant rue, but the fuller text has many mentions of the occult virtues of herbs, stones, and animals. Almost at a glance we read that the urine of a dog or the blood of a mouse cures warts; that juice of betony should be gathered on the eve of St. John the Baptist, that rubbing the soles of the feet cures a stiff neck, and that pearls or the stone found in a crab’s head are of equal virtue for heart trouble.[2938] And not far away is a passage[2939] on the virtue of the Agnus Dei, made of balsam, pure wax, and the Chrism. It protects against lightning and the waves of the sea, aids women in child-birth, saves from sudden death, and in short from “every kind of evil.” Astrology is by no means omitted from the Regimen Salernitanum; in fact Balzac seems to have taken the fact that verses were astrological in character as a sign that they belonged in the Salernitan collection.
The Practica of Archimatthaeus.
A third work which may be considered as an example of the medicine of Salerno is the Practica of Archimatthaeus which Renzi placed in the twelfth century and conjectured to be the work of Matthaeus Platearius the Elder.[2940] One or two expressions, however, might be taken as indications that the writer is neither of early date nor himself a Salernitan. He speaks of curing pleurisy in a different way from the treatment recommended in the Practica’s and tells how the Salernitans try to prevent their hair from falling out by reason of their pores opening too wide when they frequent the bath.[2941] Renzi hailed this treatise with delight as “a true medical clinic,”[2942] since the author describes some twenty-two specific cases. He states at the beginning that he does not propose to write a systematic treatise or to deal with every variety of disease, but only with those in which he has learned new and better methods by experience, “and in which God has put the desired effect in my hand.”[2943] Through the work we encounter such phrases as expertum est, aliud probatissimum, “I tell you what I have proved,” “We have tested this by experience and rejoiced at the result.” These utterances seem really to refer to the writer’s own experience and not to be copied from previous authors. The following is an example of his cases. “A certain lady incurred paralysis of the face during sleep after the bath,” which he attributes to dissolution of humors which affected the muscles. First he bled the cephalic vein, hoping thereby to draw off somewhat the humors from the afflicted place. Then for three successive days he gave her “the potion of St. Paul with wine of a decoction of salvia and castoria which in part prevent dissolution, in part consume it.” He also had her hold that wine in her mouth for a long time before swallowing it. At length he gave her a purgative with pills of yerapiga (sacrum amarum), mixed with golden pills. “Afterwards we injected pills of diacastoria into her nostrils and placed her near the fire. Finally we gave opopira (bread free from furfure) with the aforesaid wine, and so she was cured, only a certain tumor remained in her face and made her eye water. We anointed her face with golden unguent and the potion of St. Paul mixed together and the tumor disappeared; for the tears we gave golden Alexandrina and they were checked; and thus it was that this year in your presence we cured a certain paralytic.”[2944] Like Galen’s accounts of his actual cases this makes us realize that all the gruesome mixtures of which we read in the books were actually forced upon patients, often several of them upon one poor sick person, and that medical practice was rather worse than medical theory. An interesting observation concerning the lot of the lower classes is let fall by our author when, in discussing involuntary emission of urine, he states that serfs and handmaids are especially subject to this ailment, since they go about ill-clad and with bare feet and become thoroughly chilled.[2945]
A Salernitan treatise of about 1200.
Giacosa classed one of the treatises which he published as Salernitan because it was written in a Lombard or Monte Cassino hand of about 1200.[2946] He described its contents as purely therapeutical and regarded its author as showing “a certain repugnance” to the popular remedies and superstitions recommended by other contemporary treatises. For this conclusion the chief evidence seems to be a passage where the author, after listing such means to prevent a woman from conceiving as binding her head with a red ribbon or holding the stone found in the head of an ass, says that he thinks that such remedies “operate more by faith than reason.”[2947] But he makes much use of parts of animals and of suffumigations, advising for example on the same page that after conception there should be fumigation with a root of mandragora or peony or the excrement of an ass mixed with flour, an operation which he characterizes as expertissimum. And on the preceding page, as Giacosa has noted, he recommends a procedure which is even more improbable than it is immoral, whereby patients who show themselves ungrateful to the physician after they have been cured may be made to suffer again.[2948]
The wives of Salerno.
We promised to say something of the female practitioners of Salerno. Trotula is no longer believed to be a woman and we have to judge the women of Salerno mainly by what others say of them. In a commentary of a Master Bernard of Provence, who I suspect may be Bernard Gordon, the medical writer at Montpellier of the closing thirteenth century, are a number of practices attributed to the women of Salerno which Renzi has already brought together.[2949] In these cases the practices are chiefly those employed by the women themselves in child-birth. We may note three from the list that savor strongly of magic. “The women of Salerno cook doves with the acorns which the doves eat; then they remove the acorns from the gizzard and eat them, whence the retentive virtue is much comforted.” “When the women of Salerno fear abortion, they carry with them the pregnant stone,” which our author explains is not the magnet. The other recipe had perhaps better remain untranslated: Stercus asini comedunt mulieres Salernitanae in crispellis et dant viris suis ut melius retineant sperma et sic concipiant. As we shall see in our chapter on Arnald of Villanova, another medical writer of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, he condemned the use of incantations in cases of child-birth by old-wives of Salerno but approved of a very similar procedure by which a priest had cured him of warts, and also mentioned favorably the cures wrought by female practitioners at Rome and Montpellier.