Galen died about 200 A.D.; the high-water mark of the Renaissance, so far as medicine is concerned, was reached in the year 1542. In order to traverse this long interval intelligently, I will sketch certain great movements, tracing the currents of Greek thought, setting forth in their works the lives of certain great leaders, until we greet the dawn of our own day.
After flowing for more than a thousand years through the broad plain of Greek civilization, the stream of scientific medicine which we have been following is apparently lost in the morass of the Middle Ages; but, checked and blocked like the White Nile in the Soudan, three channels may be followed through the weeds of theological and philosophical speculation.
SOUTH ITALIAN SCHOOL
A WIDE stream is in Italy, where the "antique education never stopped, antique reminiscence and tradition never passed away, and the literary matter of the pagan past never faded from the consciousness of the more educated among the laity and clergy."(3) Greek was the language of South Italy and was spoken in some of its eastern towns until the thirteenth century. The cathedral and monastic schools served to keep alive the ancient learning. Monte Casino stands pre-eminent as a great hive of students, and to the famous Regula of St. Benedict(4) we are indebted for the preservation of many precious manuscripts.
(3) H. O. Taylor: The Mediaeval Mind, Vol. I, p. 251.
(4) De Renzi: Storia Documentata della Scuola Medica di Salerno,
2d ed., Napoli, 1867, Chap. V.
The Norman Kingdom of South Italy and Sicily was a meeting ground of Saracens, Greeks and Lombards. Greek, Arabic and Latin were in constant use among the people of the capital, and Sicilian scholars of the twelfth century translated directly from the Greek.
The famous "Almagest" of Ptolemy, the most important work of ancient astronomy, was translated from a Greek manuscript, as early as 1160, by a medical student of Salerno.(5)
(5) Haskins and Lockwood: Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology, 1910, XXI, pp. 75-102.
About thirty miles southeast of Naples lay Salernum, which for centuries kept alight the lamp of the old learning, and became the centre of medical studies in the Middle Ages; well deserving its name of "Civitas Hippocratica." The date of foundation is uncertain, but Salernitan physicians are mentioned as early as the middle of the ninth century, and from this date until the rise of the universities it was not only a great medical school, but a popular resort for the sick and wounded. As the scholar says in Longfellow's "Golden Legend":