UNIVERSITIES, SCHOOLS, STUDENTS. 



came to rank beside canon law. Several popes, considering profane or 

 secular jurisprudence as useless, and even opposed to ecclesiastical law, issued 

 bulls in which students were enjoined to learn only canon law. 



It is towards the close of the twelfth century, also, that the study of 

 medicine appears to have begun in the lay schools of Paris. Up to that 

 period the clerks, and especially the clergy, who alone possessed sufficient 

 learning to pursue the study of medicine, had been the sole masters of the 

 art; but in course of time ecclesiastical discipline hampered and even 



Fig. 15. Seal of the four Nations or Faculty of Arts (Sixteenth Century). 

 Paris National Library. The Cabinet of Medals. 



put a ban upon the study of it, as it had done upon that of civil law. It 

 was, therefore, only after great difficulties that a Faculty of Medicine was 

 founded at the University. It is true that medicine a science of facts and 

 observations could not well make much progress amidst the prejudices of 

 every kind, and under the blind authority of the categories, the formalities, 

 and the empiric methods which so long clung to the University teaching. 

 The Paris Faculty of Medicine could not, in these circumstances, hope to 

 dethrone the famous schools of Salerno and Montpellier, which preserved the 

 deposit of the medical knowledge of antiquity as it had been transmitted to the 



