ion that are to be noticed in connection with
Salerno. Registration, licensure, preliminary education, adequate
professional studies, clinical experience under expert guidance, even
special training for surgical work, all came in connection with this
great medical school. Such practical progress in medical education could
not have been made but by men who faced the problems of the practice of
medicine without self-deception and solved them as far as possible by
common-sense, natural, and rational methods.

It is usually said that at Salerno surgery occupied an inferior
position. It is true that we have less record of it in the earlier years
of Salerno than we would like to see. It was somewhat handicapped by the
absence of human dissection. This very important defect was not due to
any Church opposition to anatomy, as has often been said, but to the
objection that people have to seeing the bodies of their friends or
acquaintances used for anatomical purposes. In the comparatively small
towns of the Middle Ages there were few strangers, and therefore very
seldom were there unclaimed bodies. The difficulty was in the obtaining
of dissecting material. We had the same difficulty in this country until
about two generations ago, and the only way that bodies could be
obtained regularly was by "resurrecting" them, as it was called, from
graveyards. In the absence of human subjects, anatomy was taught at
Salerno upon the pig. The principal portion of the teaching in anatomy
consisted of the demonstration of the organs in the great cavities of
the body and their relations, with some investigations of their form and
the presumed functions of the corresponding organs in man. Copho's
well-known "Anatomy of the Pig" was a text-book written for the students
of Salerno. In spite of its limitations, it shows the beginnings of
rather searching original inquiry and even some observations in
pathological anatomy. It is simple and straightforward and does not
profess to be other than it is, though it must be set down as the first
reasonably complete contribution to comparative anatomy.

When their surgery came to be written down, however, it gave abundant
evidence of the thoroughness with which this department of medicine had
been cultivated by the Salernitan faculty. We have the text-book of
Roger, with the commentary of Rolando, and then the so-called commentary
of the Four Masters. These writings were probably made rather for the
medica