150 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



as indeed they continued to do for several ages 

 more. Only crowned heads, the wealthiest of the 

 nobility, or the rich merchants of the cities, began 

 to require and employ the services of regular 

 physicians. These were generally Jews, sometimes 

 Moors ; ^ and thus fashion and experience alike began 

 to make popular among our ancestors the superior 

 claims of science in medicine. Such science had un- 

 doubtedly survived from the days and in the works 

 of Hippocrates, Galen, and Celsus, and was now 

 preserved in the theory and practice of the Arabian 

 schools. 1 



This point once reached, a further advance soon 

 became inevitable. Attention had been called to 

 a deeper source of medical knowledge than that 

 generally possessed in the West. Learned men, 

 whose tastes led them this way, naturally sought 

 to inform their minds by procuring translations of 

 the Arabic works on medicine. The just fame of 

 Salerno, a medical school which had been founded 

 in the closing years of the eleventh century by 

 Robert Guiscard, depended on the intelligent zeal 

 with which this plan of research was then pursued.^ 

 The kingdom of Sicily indeed occupies as important 

 a place in the progress of the healing art as Spain 

 itself does with regard to the history of philosophy 

 and of science in general. 



Frederick ii. , as might have been expected, did 

 much to encourage and regulate these useful studies. 



^ The University Library of Genoa has an interesting ms. (F. vii. 10), 

 written in Arabic by an African hand. It belonged, A. H. 483, to 

 Judah ben Jaygh ben Israel, servant of Abu Abdallah Algani Billah, 

 a Moor of Malaga. It contains medical works by Johannes ben Mesne, 

 Rases, Alkindi, Geber, and others. 



2 For an account of the school of Salerno, see Sprengel, Vcrsuch einer 

 pragmatischen Oeschichte der Artzneyhunde ; Carmoly, Histoire des 

 Medecins Juifs, Bruxelles, 1844 ; and De Renai, Colledio SaUrmtana^ 

 Naples, 1852. 



