horoughly and
successfully cultivated as during the rise and development of the
universities and their medical schools in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.

It is interesting to trace the succession of great contributors to
surgery during these two centuries. We know their teaching not from
tradition, but from their text-books so faithfully preserved for us by
their devoted students, who must have begrudged no time and spared no
labor in copying, for many of the books are large, yet exist in many
manuscript copies.

Modern surgery may be said to owe its origin to a school of surgeons,
the leaders of whom were educated at Salerno in the early part of the
thirteenth century, and who, teaching at various north Italian
universities, wrote out their surgical principles and experiences in a
series of important contributions to that department of medical science.
The fact that the origin of the school was at Salerno, where, as is well
known, Arabian influence counted for much and for which Constantine's
translations of Arabian works proved such a stimulus a century before,
makes most students conclude that this later medieval surgical
development is simply a continuation of the Arabian surgery that, as we
have seen, developed very interestingly during the earlier Middle Ages.
Any such idea, however, is not founded on the realities of the
situation, but on an assumption with regard to the extent of Arabian
influence. Gurlt in his "History of Surgery" (Vol. I, page 701)
completely contradicts this idea, and says with regard to the first of
the great Italian writers on surgery, Rogero, that "though Arabian works
on surgery had been brought over to Italy by Constantine Africanus a
hundred years before Roger's time, these exercised no influence over
Italian surgery in the next century, and there is scarcely a trace of
the surgical knowledge of the Arabs to be found in Roger's works."

It is in the history of medicine particularly that it is possible to
trace the true influence of the Arabs on European thought in the later
Middle Ages. We have already seen in the chapter on Salerno that Arabian
influence did harm to Salernitan medical teaching. The school of Salerno
itself had developed simple, dietetic, hygienic, and general remedial
measures that included the use of only a comparatively small amount of
drugs. Its teachers emphasized nature's curative powers. With Arabian
influence came polypharmacy, distrust of nature, a