The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800Buck, Albert H. (Albert Henry)
History
The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800
Buck, Albert H. (Albert Henry)
Medicine -- History
Toward the end of the tenth, or at the beginning of the eleventh,
century the teaching of medicine at Salerno began to assume the
character of regularly organized work. The names of the men and women
who conducted it--for there were women as well as men in the corps of
teachers--are mentioned in various contemporaneous documents which have
come down to our time. They are as follows: Petroncellus, Gariopuntus,
Alphanus, Bartholomaeus, Cophon, Trotula, John and Matthew Platearius,
Abella, Mercuriade, Costanza Calenda, Rebecca Guarna, Afflacius,
Maurus, Musandinus and many others. According to Puschmann, the list
of physicians who, during the existence of the Medical School at
Salerno,--a period of nearly one thousand years,--acted as teachers
in the institution, comprised no less than 340 names. The presence
of several women among the instructors of this school, and the great
esteem in which they were held by the men of that time, both for their
ability as practitioners and for the excellence of the treatises which
they wrote, furnish strong confirmation of the statement which Plato
makes in his work entitled “The Republic,” and which I have already
quoted in one of the earlier chapters, viz.: “For women have as
pronounced an aptitude as men for the profession of medicine.” And, if
further evidence of the correctness of Plato’s opinion were needed, the
success attained by women physicians during the past thirty or forty
years in the United States of America might be cited.
To the general statement made above I may with advantage add a few
details regarding both the individual physicians at Salerno and the
books which they wrote. During recent years, thanks to the researches
of Henschel, de Renzi and Piero Giacosa, our knowledge of these matters
has been greatly enlarged. In 1837 Henschel found, in the library
at Breslau, Germany, a manuscript collection of Salerno medical
treatises (“Compendium Salernitanum”) dating back as far as the latter
part of the twelfth century of the present era. De Renzi, working
in association with Daremberg and Baudry de Balzac, succeeded in
collecting from the different libraries of Italy quite a large number
of additional Salerno treatises, all of which have since been published
under the title “_Collectio Salernitana, ossia documenti inediti e
trattati di medicina appartenenti alla scuola medica Salernitana_”
(5 vols., Naples, 1852–1859). Finally, Piero Giacosa has added to this
stock of Salerno writings by the publication (Turin, 1901) of a work
which bears the title “_Magistri Salernitani nondum editi etc._”
Beside the treatises to be found in these three collections there is
one other which, according to Neuburger, contributed more than all the
others combined to the fame of the Medical School of Salerno. The title
of this extraordinary work is: “_Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum_.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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