y, was to develop into one of
the most important schools of its kind in Europe, and to have on its
faculty list the greatest teachers of their time, who had been tempted
to come to Rome because the Popes wished to enhance the prestige of
the medical school of their capital.

While it may be a surprise for those who have been accustomed to think
of the Popes as inalterably opposed to all science, and especially to
medical science, thus to find them encouraging and fostering medical
teaching, it will only be what would naturally be expected by those
who know anything of the real history of medicine in the earlier
Middle Ages. There is no doubt at all, that during the so-called "dark
ages," that is, when the invasion of the barbarians had put out the
lights of the older civilizations, it was mainly ecclesiastics who
preserved whatever traditions there were of the old medical learning
and carried on whatever serious teaching of medicine, in the sense of
medical science, that existed during this time. The monks were the
most prominent in this; and the Benedictines, after their foundation
in the sixth century, added to their duties of caring for the other
temporal needs of the poor, who so {225} often appealed to them, that
of helping them as far as they could in any bodily ailments with which
they might be afflicted. There are even definite traditions that a
certain amount of training in medicine, or at least in the care of the
sick, was one of the features of the Benedictine monasteries.

Dr. Payne in his article on the History of Medicine in the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica said: "In civil history there is no real
break. A continuous thread of learning and practice must have
connected the last period of Roman medicine with the dawn of science
in the Middle Ages. But the intellectual thread is naturally traced
with greater difficulty than that which is the theme of civil history;
and in periods such as that from the fifth to the tenth century in
Europe, it is almost lost. The chief homes of medical as of other
learning in these disturbed times were the monasteries. Though the
science was certainly not advanced by their labors, it was saved from
total oblivion, and many ancient medical works were preserved in Latin
or the vernacular versions. It was among the Benedictines that the
monastic studies of medicine first received a new direction and aimed
at a higher standard. The study of Hippocrates, Galen, and other
classics was