- ingly on the increase; and, after it had gone into effect,
many must have been deterred from choosing a medical career, and perhaps others have been diverted to schools which were located in countries where the laws were more lax. In 1240 A. D. the Roman Emperor Frederic II., who was also King of Sicily, made it a law that the course of medical studies at Salerno should cover a period of five years. All these factors taken together would seem to have been sufficient slowly to diminish the popularity of this celebrated school. But to these there were added, in the latter half of the thirteenth century,—if we may believe Puschmann,—two new factors, which exerted a powerful influence in destroying all hope of further regeneration, viz., the establishment of a university at Naples, in 1258 A. D., by Manfred, King of Sicily, and the narrow and illiberal spirit in which the Church, by this time in almost full control of the education at Salerno, managed the medical school.
During the following four centuries the University of Salerno—for during the thirteenth century it became a university in fact, if not in name—retrograded steadily, until finally the French Government, on November 29, 1811, officially put an end to its existence. The traveler who to-day visits Salerno, in the hope of seeing some remains of the oldest medical school in Europe, will find there only a collection of squalid buildings which serve as dwellings for the poorer classes, a dirty and uncomfortable inn, and shops of nearly the same dimensions as those which once lined the narrow streets of Pompeii. As he gazes, however, at the superb view presented by the Gulf of Salerno he may readily, by an effort of the imagination, reconstruct the picture of the famous "Hippocratic City" as it was when William the Conqueror and other distinguished persons visited it nearly a thousand years ago.
Neuburger, in his review of the career of the Salerno Medical School, sums up its contributions to the science of medicine in about these terms: Those who taught at Salerno were the first physicians in the Christian part of Western Europe who procured for medicine a home in
