"Since, then, the law permits women to exercise the profession of physicians, and since, besides, due regard being had to purity of morals, women are better suited for the treatment of women's diseases, after having received the oath of fidelity, we permit," etc. The story of medical education for women with the free opportunity for practice, and above all the recognition accorded by making them professors at the University of Salerno, will seem all the more surprising to those who recall that the Benedictines largely influenced the foundation at Salerno, and were important factors in its subsequent growth and management. Ordinarily it would be presumed that monastic influence would be distinctly against permitting women to secure such opportunities for education, and, above all, encouraging their occupation with medical practice. As a matter of fact, it seems indeed to have been monastic influence which secured this special development. The Benedictines were already habituated to the idea that women were quite capable, if given the opportunity, of taking advantage of the highest education; and besides, they were accustomed to see them occupied, and successfully, with the care of the ailing. When St. Benedict established the monks of the West in retreats, where the men of the earlier Middle Ages could secure, in the midst of troubled times and with men in the cities utterly neglectful of intellectual interests, a refuge from the disturbed life around them, and an opportunity for intellectual development, his sister Scholastica afforded similar opportunities for such women as felt that they were called rather to the intellectual and spiritual life than to the taking up of the burden of domestic duties and a wife's labours. In these Benedictine convents for women, as they spread throughout Italy--and afterwards throughout Germany, and France, and England, though the fact is often ignored--the intellectual life was pursued as faithfully as the spiritual. Besides, there gathered around the convent gates as around the monasteries the farmers who worked their estates, and who found it so good "to live under the crozier," as the rule of the Abbot or Abbess was called, and who always suffered severely whenever, by confiscation or war or like disturbances, the monastic lands passed into the hands of laymen. For their own large numbers as well as for their peasantry, and for the travellers who stayed in their guest-houses, the nuns had to provide medical attendance; and the infirmarians of the convents, situated as they were so often far from cities or towns, acquired considerable medical knowledge and came to apply it with excellent success. The traditions were gathered from many quarters, and passed on for centuries from one house to another; and they gathered simples and treated the ordinary ailments, and nursed the ailing into moods of greater courage and states of mind that predisposed to recovery.