After Salerno the next great medical school was that of Montpellier in the
South of France. The conditions which brought about its original
establishment are very like those which occasioned the foundation of
Salerno. Montpellier, situated not far from the Mediterranean, came to be
a health resort. Patients flocked to it from many countries of the West of
Europe; physicians settled there because patients were numerous, and
medical instruction came to be offered to students. Fame came to the
school. The fundamental reason for this striking development of the
intellectual life seems to have been that Montpellier was not far from
Marseilles, which had been a Greek colony originally and continued to be
under Greek influence for many centuries. As a consequence of this the
artistic and intellectual life of the southern part of France was higher
during the earlier Middle Ages than that of any other part of Europe,
except certain portions of South Italy. The remains of the magnificent
architecture of the Roman period are well known, and Provence has always
been famous for its intellectual and literary life. Among a people who
were in this environment, we might well look for an early renaissance of
education.
It is not surprising, then, that one of the earliest of the medical
schools of modern history around which there gradually developed a
university should have come into existence in this part of the world. What
is even more interesting perhaps for us, is that this medical school has
persisted down to our own day, and has always been, for nearly ten
centuries now, a centre of excellent medical education.
There gathered around the story of its origin such legends as were noted
with regard to the history of Salerno, and there is no doubt that Jewish
and Moorish physicians who became professors there contributed not a
little to the prestige of the school and the reputation that it acquired
throughout Europe. The attempt to attribute all of the stimulus for the
intellectual life at Montpellier to these foreign elements is, however,
simply due to that paradoxical state of mind which has so often tried to
minimize the value of Christian contributions to science and the
intellectual life, even by the exaggeration of the significance of what
came from foreign and un-Christian sources. Proper recognition must be
accorded to both Jewish and Moorish factors at Montpellier, but the one
important element is that these foreign professors brought with them, even
though always in rather far-fetched translations, the ideas of the great
Greek masters of medicine to which the region and the people around
Montpellier were particularly sensitive, because of the Greek elements in
the population, and hence the development of a significant centre of
education here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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