In part this was due to the climate and in part to its mineral springs.
Southern Italy had, more than any other part of western Europe, retained
touch with old Greek thought. The works of Hippocrates and Galen had been
preserved there, the monks at Monte Cassino had made some translations,
and sometime toward the middle of the eleventh century the study of the
Greek medical books was revived here. The Mohammedan medical work by
Avicenna (p. 185), also early became known here in translation. About 1065
Constantine of Carthage, a converted Jew and a learned monk, who had
traveled extensively in the East [23] and who had been forced to flee from
his native city because of a suspicion of "black art," began to lecture at
Salerno on the Greek and Mohammedan medical works and the practice of the
medical art. In 1099 Robert, Duke of Normandy, returning from the First
Crusade, stopped here to be cured of a wound, and he and his knights later
spread the fame of Salerno all over Europe. The result was the revival of
the study of Medicine in the West, and Salerno developed into the first of
the medical schools of Europe. Montpellier, in southern France, also
became another early center for the study of Medicine, drawing much of its
medical knowledge from Spain. Another new subject of professional study
was now made possible, and Faculties of Medicine were in time organized in
most of the universities as they arose. The instruction, though, was
chiefly book instruction, Galen being the great textbook until the
seventeenth century.


IV. OTHER NEW INFLUENCES AND MOVEMENTS

THE CRUSADES. Perhaps the most romantic happenings during the Middle Ages
were that series of adventurous expeditions to the then Far East,
undertaken by the kings and knights of western Europe in an attempt to
reclaim the Holy Land from the infidel Turks, who in the eleventh century