- ence of the Medical School at Salerno,—a period of nearly
one thousand years,—acted as teachers in the institution, comprised no less than 340 names. The presence of several women among the instructors of this school, and the great esteem in which they were held by the men of that time, both for their ability as practitioners and for the excellence of the treatises which they wrote, furnish strong confirmation of the statement which Plato makes in his work entitled "The Republic," and which I have already quoted in one of the earlier chapters, viz.: "For women have as pronounced an aptitude as men for the profession of medicine." And, if further evidence of the correctness of Plato's opinion were needed, the success attained by women physicians during the past thirty or forty years in the United States of America might be cited.
To the general statement made above I may with advantage add a few details regarding both the individual physicians at Salerno and the books which they wrote. During recent years, thanks to the researches of Henschel, de Renzi and Piero Giacosa, our knowledge of these matters has been greatly enlarged. In 1837 Henschel found, in the library at Breslau, Germany, a manuscript collection of Salerno medical treatises ("Compendium Salernitanum") dating back as far as the latter part of the twelfth century of the present era. De Renzi, working in association with Daremberg and Baudry de Balzac, succeeded in collecting from the different libraries of Italy quite a large number of additional Salerno treatises, all of which have since been published under the title "Collectio Salernitana, ossia documenti inediti e trattati di medicina appartenenti alla scuola medica Salernitana" (5 vols., Naples, 1852-1859). Finally, Piero Giacosa has added to this stock of Salerno writings by the publication (Turin, 1901) of a work which bears the title "Magistri Salernitani nondum editi etc." Beside the treatises to be found in these three collections there is one other which, according to Neuburger, contributed more than all the others combined to the fame of the Medical School of Salerno. The title of this extraordinary work is: "Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum."
