in the renaissance of medical learning which began a century or two earlier, which already in the thirteenth century had made great progress, and which very soon—as time is reckoned in the calendar of all important world movements—was to culminate in that still greater renaissance called "modern medicine."
During the later portion of the Middle Ages (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) there were four universities which possessed medical schools of considerable importance—viz., those of Bologna and Padua in Italy, and those of Montpellier and Paris in France. All of these seats of learning, like the famous school at Salerno, developed so gradually and from such modest beginnings that it is scarcely possible to assign to any of them a date of origin. Medicine was taught at several other places—as, for instance, at Oxford, England; at Naples, Vicenza, Siena, Rome, Florence, Ferrara, Pisa and Pavia, in Italy; at Salamanca and Lerida, in Spain; at Prague, in Bohemia; at Cologne, in Germany; at Vienna, in Austria, etc. But the part which these smaller schools played in the work of advancing our knowledge of medicine was certainly of far less importance than that which fell to the lot of the four institutions just mentioned.
The University of Montpellier, if not the oldest of the four schools mentioned, was apparently the first to attain some degree of celebrity. It is known, for example, that the Archbishop of Lyons, who was suffering at the time from some malady which the physicians of that city were not able to cure, visited Montpellier 1153 A. D. in the belief that he might there obtain the desired relief. John of Salisbury, who lived during the latter half of the twelfth century and who was considered one of the greatest scholars of his time, declared that those who wished to acquire a satisfactory knowledge of medicine, found that Salerno and Montpellier were the only places where the desired instruction might be obtained. Gilles de Corbeil (mentioned in the last chapter), Von der Aue, and other eminent men of the same period spoke in equally favorable terms of the merits of Montpellier. The celebrated monk,
