Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/277

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upon this assumption that we can satisfactorily explain why, for many years in succession, physicians traveled all the way from France, Germany and England to Salerno. They were eager to gain additional knowledge of medicine, and clinical instruction afforded the only sure way of obtaining it; but instruction of this kind was nowhere else to be obtained at that remote period, and consequently men of this earnest and ambitious stamp were compelled to make the long journey and to incur the expense and the risk incident to such a trip. As a further evidence of the value which the physicians of the later Middle Ages set upon the writings of the teachers at Salerno, the fact deserves to be mentioned that, toward the end of the twelfth century and all through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, these works were frequently quoted.

But the ability and learning of the Salerno physicians were highly appreciated by the public at large as well as by their confrères in other lands; for many people of wealth and of high social standing visited Salerno for the purpose of consulting them. Among the number were Adalberon, Bishop of Verdun, France, who journeyed thither in 984 A. D., but failed to obtain the relief which he required; Desiderius, the Abbot of Monte Cassino; Bohemund, the son of Duke Robert Guiscard; and William the Conqueror, afterward King of England. The two last named remained for some time in Salerno, in order to secure needed treatment for the wounds which they had received in battle.

Toward the end of the tenth, or at the beginning of the eleventh, century the teaching of medicine at Salerno began to assume the character of regularly organized work. The names of the men and women who conducted it—for there were women as well as men in the corps of teachers—are mentioned in various contemporaneous documents which have come down to our time. They are as follows: Petroncellus, Gariopuntus, Alphanus, Bartholomaeus, Cophon, Trotula, John and Matthew Platearius, Abella, Mercuriade, Costanza Calenda, Rebecca Guarna, Afflacius, Maurus, Musandinus and many others. According to Puschmann, the list of physicians who, during the exist-