s a true professional spirit down to our
own time. They insisted on a preliminary education of three years of
college work, on at least four years of medical training, on special
study for specialist's work, as in surgery, and on practical training
with a physician or in a hospital before the student was allowed to
practise for himself. At Salerno, too, the department of women's
diseases was given over to women professors, and we have the text-books
of some of these women medical teachers. The license to practise given
to women, however, seems to have been general and did not confine them
merely to the care of women and children. We have records of a number of
these licenses issued to women in the neighborhood of Salerno. This
subject of feminine medical education at Salerno, because of its special
interest in our time, will have a chapter by itself.

These are the special features of medical education in our own time
that we are rather prone to think of as originating with ourselves and
as being indices of that evolution of humanity and progress in mankind
which are culminating in our era. It is rather interesting, then, to
study just how these developments came about and what the genesis of
this great school was. The books of its professors were widely read, not
only in their own generation but for centuries afterwards. With the
invention of printing at the time of the Renaissance most of them were
printed and exerted profound influence over the revival of medicine
which took place at that time. Salerno became the first of the
universities in the modern sense of the word. Here there gathered round
the medical school, first a preparatory department representing modern
college work, and then departments of theology and law, though this
latter department particularly was never quite successful. The fact that
the first university, that of Salerno, should have been organized round
a medical school, the second, that of Bologna, around a law school, and
the third, that of Paris, around a school of theology and philosophy,
would seem to represent the ordinary natural process of development in
human interests. First man is interested in himself and in his health,
then in his property, and finally in his relations to his fellow-man and
to God.

Though much work has been done on the subject in recent years, it is not
easy to trace the origin of the medical school at Salerno. The
difficulty is emphasized by the fact that even th