Our journal cover

OUR JOURNAL COVER

During a millennium, people from several origins and languages fought to survive in Europe tortured by rivalry and plague, leaving barbarism towards a society based on order, charity and devotion to God.

On the first five centuries of the Middle Ages, habitual groupings of people consisted of villages organized around a feudal house, castle, abbey or hospital. There was not a city that could compare, even remotely, to the sumptuous cities from the Byzantine and the Moslem empires.

The first medieval center of layman’s medicine appeared next to the Tyrrhenian Sea, at a spa town famous since Horace’s time. In Salerno (South of Naples), during the 10^th century, a community of physicians, professors, students, and translators used to meet, what originated the first western medical school, real representative of Hippocratic culture.

Emperor Frederic II, patron of science and medicine, decreed in 1232 that the curriculum of Salerno School should include three years of logic, five of medicine and one of practice, concluding with the certificate.

The most edited (1.500 editions), translated and adapted popular book of medieval medical history was used in Salerno School: the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum (or the Flower of Medicine), a hygiene manual about diet, sleep, exercise, work and games. Contrary to other medical books edited in that period, it was free from superstitions and used Galenic, Hippocratic and pseudo-Aristotelic sources. The Regimen dealt with anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, phlebotomy, clysters and laxatives; it recommended moderation when eating and drinking the first meal of bread immersed in wine, the use of cheese at the end of a meal, sliced onions to the growth of hair and prunes as laxative. Moreover, it suggested that copulation and bath could be prejudicial. Originally not conceived as a popular work, the book execrated physicians who indiscriminately revealed secrets of the art of healing.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  04 Aug 2006
• Date of issue
  June 2006