Schola Medica Salernitana



The Schola Medica Salernitana (Italian: Scuola Medica Salernitana) was the first medieval medical school in the cosmopolitan coastal south Italian city of Salerno, which provided the most important native source of medical knowledge in Europe at the time. Arab medical treatises in Greek translations had accumulated in the library of Montecassino, where they were translated into Latin; this received lore of Galen and Dioscorides was supplemented and invigorated by Arabic medical practice, known from contacts with Sicily and North Africa. As a result the medical practitioners of Salerno, both men and women, was unrivalled in the Western Mediterranean for its practical concerns.

The school, which found its original base in the dispensary of a monastery founded in the ninth century, achieved its utmost splendour between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, during the final decades of Lombard power, during which its fame began to spread more than locally, to the fall of the Hohenstaufen. The arrival in Salerno of Constantine Africanus in 1077, marked the beginning of Salerno's classic period. Through the impulse given by Alfano I, Archbishop of Salerno, and Constantine Africanus, whose translations from the Arabic won for Salerno the title of "Town of Hippocrates" (Hippocratica Civitas or Hippocratica Urbs). People from all over the world flocked to the "Schola Salerni", both the sick, in the hope of recovering, and students, to learn the art of medicine.

Its fame crossed borders, as proved by the Salernitanan manuscripts kept in many European libraries, and by historical witnesses. The twelfth or thirteenth-century author of the poem Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum gave a Salernitan provenance to his poem, in order to advertise his work and give validity to it. The School kept the Greek-Latin cultural tradition going, merging it harmoniously with the Arab and Jewish culture. The meeting of different cultures led to a medical learning arising from the synthesis and the comparison of different experiences, as is evidenced by a legend that ascribes the foundation of the school to four masters: the Jewish Helinus, the Greek Pontus, the Arab Adela, and the Latin Salernus. In the school, besides the teaching of medicine (in which women too were involved, as both teachers and students), there were courses of philosophy, theology, and law.

Books made the Salernitan school famous. They had a strong start with the Pantegni, Constantine's translation and adaptation of the Al-malaki of Ali ibn Abbas, ten volumes of theoretical medicine and ten of practical medicine. He had also translated a treatise on the ophthalmology of Hunain and the Viaticus of Ibn al Jazzar.

By the thirteenth century the medical school at Montpellier began to eclipse the Salernitan school.