Thus while medicine was declining in Greece it kept alive in Arabia; but it seems scarcely to have survived the thirteenth century in either. This was the period of its downfal. Europe and Asia were obscured by the cloud of ignorance, and the arts of war or poetry were alone cultivated. European genius began first to penetrate the obscurity; but in this cloud of barbarity we for a long time catch but a few imperfect rays. As we found medical science stealing by almost imperceptible steps from Greece to Asia, so we shall here perceive, that, from the western extremity of the extensive empire of the Saracens, it gradually expanded to different parts of Europe. It is too much the fashion to refer the spread of knowledge to the Crusades. The human mind wants not such a powerful momentum: the gradual expansion of its own powers will solve the problem. The short distance from Spain to Italy, and the constant intercourse, even at this time, gradually introduced the medical knowledge of the Arabians to the latter country. It has been supposed that Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic professors of medicine were settled at Salernum in the seventh century. This opinion has, however, no well founded support; but it must have attained some credit, as a school, before 802, when Charlemagne founded a college there. It will be obvious, however, that, at this period, medicine could have gained little from the Arabian authors', since they were then imperfectly known even in the east; so that if, in reality, Salernum was so early a school of medicine, it must have gleaned the little knowledge it possessed from the later Grecians and the Byzantine authors. We are consequently ready to deny this early antiquity of Salernum as a seminary of medicine, and the more willingly, as its first author, Constantine the Carthaginian, flourished only at the end of the eleventh century. He did not collect all the accumulating science of this establishment of Charles the Great, but is expressly said to have resided, for a long period of his life, in Babylon and Bagdat. He was appointed secretary to Robert Guiscard, duke of Apulia, about the middle of the eleventh century; and there is much reason to believe that Salernum was established as a medical school about that time. Its appellation, Civitas

Hippocratica, shows that it was considered to be a scion of the Grecian stock; and, however barbarous the Latin style of the African may appear, it is said that he was intimately acquainted with Greek. He was afterwards a monk of Mount Cassino, thence called Cassinus, and dedicated his work, Breviarium dictum Viaticum, to its abbot, Desiderius, raised afterwards to the purple by the name of Victor the Third. Several other works, particularly the Antidotarium, and the Loci Communes, were written by him; but the substance is copied from the Greek and Arabian authors: the latter is apparently a servile translation of the work of Haly Abbas, though professedly an original, and, as he remarked, greatly wanted. The Schola Salertina, a Treatise on Diet and Medicine, in leonine verses, was probably composed very early in the twelfth century, and was for a long period highly celebrated. It is said to have been written by John of Milan, and was dedicated to the duke of Normandy, son of the conqueror.

Salernum perhaps justly boasts of its priority as a medical seminary, and the school of Montpelier is the next, the foundation of which Astruc, in his memoirs on this subject, refers to 1150. That of Paris was founded, according to Naudaeus, by papal authority, in 1220, and the school of Bologna in the following century. To this chronological series there is but one objection, that AEgidius, whose Latin hexameters on the Virtues of Medicines, the Urine, and Pulse, written towards the close of the twelfth century, is somewhat severe in his reflections on those who were educated at Montpelier; a circumstance which must have arisen, if the dates are admitted, from personal opposition, as the character of the school could not have been, at so early a period, ascertained.

Few, however, were the physicians of character educated in these seminaries. One road to fame and fortune was obstructed; for the chief physicians of kings and princes were Jews; nor was the intolerance of the Spaniards so rigid as to reject this nation when their own lives and healths were in danger. The emperor Frederick II. attempted to restore the study of anatomy. In his Treatise on Hawking he introduced several valuable remarks on comparative anatomy, and instituted public dissections and demonstrations. Fifty years after this attempt, his laudable career was checked, in 1300, by a bull of pope Boniface, who forbade the dissection and preparation of the human body. To this edict Mundinus alludes, when he declines a demonstration of the internal parts of the ear; because it is necessary to separate the bones by boiling, which"propter peccatum dimittere consuevi." Mundinus was an anatomist and a physician of considerable celebrity: indeed, so great was his credit, that any observations on the structure of the body, which did not coincide with his, were supposed to relate to lusus naturae.

Arnold of Villanova and Peter Julian the Spaniard (afterwards pope John XXI.) were both celebrated for their knowledge of medicine, about the end of the thirteenth century. The former has been chiefly commended for his chemical knowledge; but, though none of his works remain, it is certain that he was not less famous as a practical physician. The latter was the author of several works, both physiological and practical; but all are copied from the Arabian or the Greek authors. Gordonus, a Scotchman, was professor at Montpelier early in the fourteenth century, and his system of the practice of medicine, entitled Lilium Medicum, contains some remedies not yet wholly forgotten. These are the troches, which still bear his name, and the pul-vis ad guttetam. Petrus de Apono, an author of the same era, was one of the first professors in the university of Padua, then recently established. His chief credit was derived from his chemical remedies, of which very few were invented by himself. He practised at Bologna, and attained a high degree of reputation, with a handsome fortune. Apono commenced a supplement to Mesue, which Francis of Piedmont, in the service of Robert, king of Naples, continued.