From Salerno, the tradition of medicine and surgery spread to Bologna
early in the thirteenth century, and thence to the other universities of
Italy and to France. Montpellier represented an independent focus of
modern progress in medicine, partly due to close relationship with the
Moors in Spain and the Greek influences they carried with them from Asia
Minor, but not a little of it consequent upon the remnants of the older
Greek culture, still not entirely dead even in the thirteenth century,
because Marseilles, not far away, had been a Greek colony originally, and
still retained living Greek influence, and wherever Greek got a chance to
exercise its stimulant incentive modern scientific medicine began to
develop.
France owed most of her development in medicine and surgery at the end of
the Middle Ages to the stream of influence that flowed out of Italian
universities. Such men as Lanfranc, who was an Italian born but exiled;
Mondeville, who studied in Italy; and Guy de Chauliac, who has so freely
acknowledged his obligation to Italian teachers, were the capital sources
of medical and surgical teaching in France in the later Middle Ages.
It is thus easy to see how the two periods of historical import in
medicine at the beginning and end of the Middle Ages may be placed in
their intimate relation to Greek influences. At the beginning, Greek
medicine was not yet dead in Asia Minor, and it influenced the Arabs. When
the revival came, it made itself first felt in the portions of Southern
Italy and Southern France where Greek influence had been strongest and
still persisted. Fortunately for us, the great Renaissance printers and
scholars, themselves touched by the Greek spirit of their time, put the
books of the writers of these two periods into enduring printed form, and
in more recent years many reprints of them have been issued. These volumes
make it possible for us to understand just how thoroughly these colleagues
of the Middle Ages faced their problems, and solved them with a practical
genius that deserves the immortality that their works have been given.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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