The Medical School of Salerno

The story

Doctors without universities

In the early Middle Ages in Western Europe, getting treated was difficult. The knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman doctors, such as Hippocrates and Galen, had been largely lost or reduced to a few summaries. People turned to the monasteries, where monks grew medicinal herbs and cared for the sick, to village healers and to the shrines of saints, where they prayed to get better. Very few doctors had real training.

Salerno, in southern Italy, on the gulf of the same name, was a different kind of city. It lay in a meeting-place of Latin, Greek, Arab and Jewish culture. Merchants and pilgrims arrived in its port from all over the Mediterranean, and with them, probably, came books and news. In Salerno there were hospitals linked to the monasteries and many doctors.

The School

We do not know exactly when the medical school of Salerno began. A legend says it was founded by four masters: a Latin, a Greek, an Arab and a Jew. It is a nice story, but it is not documented. One of the first certain pieces of evidence dates from about 988: Bishop Adalbero of Verdun, in France, fell ill and went to Salerno to be treated. By then the city was famous as the “city of Hippocrates”, in memory of the great Greek doctor.

It was not a university like those of today, with buildings, degrees and fixed rules, but a community of doctors who taught the young through lectures, cases of sick people and writings. Nor was it a religious school: the masters were often laymen, that is, not priests, and were married. In a city with such varied traditions, women too could practise medicine. The most famous was Trota, who lived in the 12th century and to whom a treatise on women's illnesses, “De passionibus mulierum”, is attributed, although scholars argue about its real author.

Arabic books translated

In the 11th century a merchant from Carthage, in Tunisia, Constantine the African, arrived in Salerno. He knew Arabic and Arab medicine, which at that time was much more advanced than Latin medicine. He became a monk at Monte Cassino and translated many Arabic medical treatises into Latin, giving Europeans access to a body of knowledge that would otherwise have stayed locked in the Arabic language. Some of the translations, however, were free, or were presented as his own works.

Constantine's work, which also contained descriptions of the eye, the brain and drugs, was much discussed in the following centuries. In this way the doctors of Salerno were able to compare themselves with the books of Hippocrates, Galen and Arab doctors such as Rhazes and Haly Abbas (Avicenna came only later, in the 12th century). They also experimented with dissection: in the 12th century they studied the bodies of pigs, which are similar to human ones, in a text called the “Anatomy of the Pig”.

The poem of health

The School's most famous work is the “Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum”, a collection of health advice in Latin verse, easy to remember, which spread all over Europe and was copied, translated and printed in hundreds of editions. It gave practical suggestions: eat in moderation, sleep the right amount, wash your hands before meals, take a walk after dinner, stay cheerful. The first line, in essence, says: if you want to stay healthy, put heavy worries aside and do not get angry, because anger is bad for you.

In 1231 the emperor Frederick II, with the “Constitutions of Melfi”, laid down that to practise medicine in his kingdom you had to be examined by the masters of Salerno, and separated the trade of the doctor from that of the apothecary, that is, the person who prepares medicines. With time the school lost importance in the face of the new universities and was closed in 1811.