he should inform his friends that he
is very ill; in this way, if a cure is affected, the fame of the doctor
will be so much the greater, but if the patient dies people will say
that the doctor had foreseen the fatal issue."

The story of the medical school of Salerno, even thus briefly and
fragmentarily told, illustrates very well how old is the new in
education,--even in medical education. There is scarcely a phase of
modern interest in medical education that may not be traced very clearly
at Salerno though the school began its career a thousand years ago, and
ceased to attract much attention over six hundred years ago. We owe
most of our knowledge of the details of its organization and teaching to
De Renzi. Without the devotion of so ardent a scholar it would have been
almost impossible for us to have attained so complete a picture of
Salernitan activities. As it is, as a consequence of his work we are
able to see this first of modern medical schools developing very much as
do our most modern medical schools. There has been an accumulation of
medical information in the thousand years, but the ways and modes of
facing problems and many of the solutions of them do not differ from
what they were in the distant past. The more we know about any
particular period, the more is this brought home to us. It is for this
that study of particular periods and institutions of the olden time, as
of Salerno, grows increasingly interesting, because each new detail
helps to fill in sympathetically the new-old picture of human activity
as it may be seen at all times.

VII

CONSTANTINE AFRICANUS

Probably the most important representative of the medical school at
Salerno, certainly the most significant member of its faculty, if we
consider the wide influence for centuries after his time that his
writings had, was Constantine Africanus. He is interesting, too, for
many other reasons, for he is the first representative, in modern times,
that is, who, after the incentive of antiquity had passed, devoted
himself to creating a medical literature by translations, by editions,
and by the collation of his own and others' observations on medical
subjects. He is the connecting link between Arabian medicine and Western
medical studies. The fact that he was first a traveller over most of the
educational world of his time, then a professor at the University of
Salerno who attracted many students, and finally a Benedictine monk in
the gr