ch medical societies are
trying to solve at the present moment, were also occupying the
attention of the civil authorities about seven centuries ago. Anyone
who reads this law will not be loath to believe that it represents the
culmination of a series of efforts to regulate medical practice, and
especially medical education, and that it was not merely a chance
legal utterance that happened to touch a single important question for
the first time. One of the paragraphs of the law even contains some
clauses that would prevent fake medical schools and that establishes a
board of medical examiners. This consisted of certain state officials
and some professors of the art of medicine. In a word, medical
education had reached a high grade of development, and medical
practice was legally established on a high plane of professional
dignity.

Salerno had already enjoyed a high reputation as a medical school for
more than two centuries when Frederick's law was promulgated. It is
true that we have no definite records of dissections done in the
school. If these were not an uncommon occurrence, however, but came as
did dissections later on, quite as a matter of course, the absence of
such records, when we recall how liable to destruction were the meagre
accounts of the university transactions of the time during the long
period that has intervened and because of the many vicissitudes they
were liable to, is not surprising. During the century following this
decree there seems to be no doubt that dissections were done
regularly, though {66} perhaps not very frequently from our modern
standpoint, at Salerno. Salerno, as we shall see in the chapter on The
Papal Medical School, was always closely in touch with the
ecclesiastical authorities, and especially with the Papacy. There was
no hint of friction of any kind, either before or after this law of
Frederick's. The question of ecclesiastical interference with
dissection does not seem to have arisen at all, much less to have
proved an obstacle to the development of medical science.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the center of interest in
anatomy and the matter of dissections shifts to Bologna. We have
already discussed the question whether Mondino was the first to do
public anatomies, and as to whether he performed only the few that by
a narrow misunderstanding of certain of his own words have sometimes
been ascribed to him. Professor Pilcher, in the article The Mondino
Myth