- guages of the East. Upon visiting Spain as a fugitive
from his native city, he took with him several of the works of Hippocrates and Galen, and in course of time translated them into Latin. Finally, he accepted the position of secretary to Robert Guiscard, the first Norman Duke of Calabria and Apulia, who appears to have selected Salerno as his place of residence. At the same time he became one of the teachers at the medical school of that city, and served in this capacity for a certain length of time; but, at the end of a few years, he was formally accepted by the Abbot Desiderius as a member of the Monte Cassino community, and it was here that he did the larger part of his literary work. His death occurred in 1087 A. D., the same year in which the Abbot Desiderius—or, rather, Pope Victor III.—died.
Constantinus was a prodigious worker, but it is doubtful whether he did anything of an original character. Not a few of the treatises which were, at that time, credited to him as original productions, are now known—thanks largely to the researches of the great French historian and linguist, Daremberg—to be simply translations from the Arabic.
It is believed by some authorities that at Monte Cassino medicine was taught to laymen as well as to those who were preparing to become members of the Benedictine Order of monks. It is not likely, however, that this was done to any great extent, as much better facilities for acquiring knowledge of medicine were available at Salerno in the near neighborhood.
In some parts of Gaul, in the early Middle Ages, physicians received very little consideration; indeed, to us moderns it seems strange that any one should have possessed sufficient courage to accept the responsibility of prescribing for a member of one of the royal families. It is related by Neuburger, on the authority of Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, that when Austrichildis, the wife of King Guntram (sixth century A. D.), was ill with the plague and perceived that her death was near at hand, she sent for her husband and extracted from him a
