The Medical School of Montpellier

The Medical School of Montpellier was open possibly in 12th century. Montpellier was a health resort like Salerno. It may have begun as an offshoot of the Salerno Medical School.

During the 2nd half of the 13th century, many disturbances in Italy caused physicians such Roger de Parma to migrate to Southern France, carrying with them the works of AlBulcasis.

The Faculty of Medicine, Montpellier

By about 1200, the reputation of the Montpellier school had surpassed that of Salerno. At the end of the 12th century, teachers included Monks, Jews and Islamic Doctors. The earliest teaching was in Arabic and Hebrew, but Latin became of the official language by the 12th century.

Montpellier was famed as a great medical school from the later middle ages onwards, and a complex medical community existed in and around the city and the university.

Medicine was the principle service industry in Montpellier: professors, private physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, apprentices, university students, hospitals and the sick had been constant feature in the city for centuries.

The Montpellier master surgeon François de La Peyronie, who was the First Surgeon to Louis XV, was instrumental in gaining the king’s support for establishment of the Society royale de chirurgie in Pairs in 1731. After the rise of medical school at Padua its face gradually came it continue its celebration upto 1890.
The Medical School of Montpellier

Schola Medica Salernitana: The world's first medical school

Salerno became the capital of an independent Longobard principality in 839 and the capital of the Norman duchy of Apulia in 1077. After1127 the capital of the now Norman kingdom was moved to Palermo but Salerno remained the most important city of the continental part of the kingdom.

The Salernitana School in the south Italian city of Salerno was the first medical school that provided the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time.

The school, which found its original base in the dispensary of a monastery founded in the ninth century, achieved it utmost spender between the tenth and thirteenth centuries during which its fame began to spread throughout the region.

According to legend, the school was founded by four physicians, an Arab, a Jew, a Greek and a Latin. Although this is only a legend, it is significant as an expression of the notion that medicine transcends all cultural and ethnic barriers.  In the tenth century the place was certainly famous for the skill of its physicians; while in the first half of the twelfth century the school is described by Ordericus Vitalis as ‘existing from ancient times’.

There are some traces of the study or at least the practice of medicine here as early as the ninth century. They may have been physicians participating in Salerno before the school was founded. In the city in fact there was a hospital or hospice (St. Maximus) founded in 820 by a cleric, Adelmo.

Salernitan School drew students and physicians from many countries and had women as students and on its teaching staff.

It was given a great support in 1224 by Frederick II of Sicily who decreed that all those practicing medicine required the approval of the school.

The success of the Salernitana School encouraged the creation of other schools with simailri methods; the most famous of these were in Bologna, Padua, Pisa, and Naples in Italy and Montpellier and Paris in France.
Schola Medica Salernitana: The world's first medical school

Gariopontus of Salerno

Gariopontus of Salerno was a renowned physician and scholar active in southern Italy around the middle of the eleventh century.

He was a native of the Kingdom of Naples.

As a medical writer, his textual activity consisted of producing one mammoth volume called the Passionorius or Liber nosematon, which systematically covers the human disease and their cure from head to foot.

He is the earliest medical writer connected with the School of Salerno, appears repeatedly in the Salernitan documents of the eleventh century.

Another work connected with early Salernitan medicine is Practica Petrocelli Salernitani by Petronus or Petrocellus which is similar content and structure with Passionorius. He might be the student of Gariopontus.
Gariopontus of Salerno