Schola Medica Salernitana

The Schola Medica Salernitana (Italian: Scuola Medica Salernitana) was a late Medieval medical school. Situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea in the south Italian city of Salerno, it was the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time. Arabic medical treatises, both those that were translations of Greek texts and those that were originally written in Arabic, had accumulated in the library of Montecassino, where they were translated into Latin; thus the received lore of Hippocrates, 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, were unrivalled in the medieval Western Mediterranean for practical concerns.

The school, which found its original base in the dispensary of a monastery founded in the 9th century, achieved its utmost splendour between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, from the last 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 encouragement of Alfano I, Archbishop of Salerno and translations of Constantine Africanus, Salerno gained 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.

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