Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/17

THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 9 In no department of knowledge was the long and dreary period of what are emphatically called the “dark ages” more blank and desolate; and for a period of eight centuries surgery shared the common fate of science. From the overthrow of the Roman empire, until the revival of literature and the arts in Europe, it was exclusively in the preservation of the Arabians, who practised physic and surgery in common, although prohibited by their religion from dissecting dead bodies. Their medical knowledge was essentially derived from the old Greek writers, many of whose MSS., preserved from destruction at the burning of the famous Alexandrian Library A.D. 640, they garbled and put forth as original productions. Throughout Europe the practice of medicine was chiefly in the hands of the clergy; and that of surgery, from which the priests were restrained on pain of excommunication by repeated Papal edicts, was consigned to Jews, women, and illiterate pretenders. To the Italian College of Salernum near Naples, erected into an university by the Emperor Frederic II. early in the thirteenth century—the first Christian university in Europe—is due the honour of the revival of medical learning, by its translation of the Arabian MSS., as well as the Arabian copies of the Greek authors, into the Latin tongue. A constant communication between these countries had been kept up by the education of the Salernian professors in the