Monte CAssINo 216 
of Rome.* Finally the city came to be known as the Civitas 
Hippocratica. 
Medical learning at Salerno was transmitted for centuries by 
a guild of lay-physicians, who maintained an air of mystery and 
*Three Benedictine monasteries at Salerno founded at dates between 600 and 958, 
also produced men of high medical attainment. Their early fame is however lost in 
order. St. Benedict, who lived 480-543, enjoined upon his monks of Monte Cassino 
not only to cultivate the land but to read and to copy manuscripts. They were long 
secure in‘ their mountain home, perched above Cassino, northeast of Naples, safely on 
the Neapolitan side of the Garigliano river, Charlemagne’s southern boundary, his do- 
main reaching within a few miles of the monastery. 
the West during his century.’’ He labored to build upa medical and general library ; as 
we are told by the chronicler of the cloister, Leo Marsicanus—otherwise known as Leo 
Ostiensis ; who died 1115, author of the ‘‘ Chronica monasterii Casinensis ” in some 
three books, before 1101 (when he became Bishop of Ostia), and finished by Petrus 
Diaconus, deacon at Ostia in 1128. 
eo writes that Bertharius enriched the library of his cloister with two codices— 
‘wherein Bertharius had compiled a very full series of healing remedies from esteemed 
writers,”’ and also a recipe collection, perhaps, says Meyer, the outcome of that toward 
which Marcellus Empiricus had made a beginning. Meyer, however, concludes that 
. : 
Salerno in 872, now a 
dered Bertharius and expelled the monks, who remained for a time at Rome, and then, 
der their abbot, Angelarius, 884-9, at Teano, some 20 miles southwest of 
Cassino, 
Since writing the above, Prof. Giacosa of Turin has published his Magistrt Salerni- 
tanae nondum editi (see infra, p. 217-8), in which, p. xxii, he claims that the two oldest 
medical codices existing among the Monte Cassino MSS. are of a handwriting which dates 
them within the ninth century. Evidently they need further study to determine if they 
; i Of the 
earlier codex, 69, Giacosa writes: ‘“ It is a collection of receipts and prescriptions col- 
— from various books through the labors of a monk for the benefit of his compan- 
tons; including miscellaneous receipts ; an antidotarium ; a treatise on female diseases s 
one on fevers ; the letters known as Capsula eburnea, attributed to Hippocrates ; dis- 
cussion of the seasons of the year and their appropriate regimen; @ book o' 
, on baths, on exercise, and on 
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Tent at that epoch (exclusive of surgery), in logical order an 
authors, though not always correctly. It was evidently a long tim : 
for the studious in medicine.” Its materials consist, first, of general and special path- 
ology, including works attributed to Hippocrates, Galen, Vindicianus, Aurelius, and 
