Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/354

 themselves more and more, as time went on, in sanitary science as applied to municipal affairs. In most communities the need for such was indeed most urgent at that time. The reforms of this nature were pushed with special vigor in those parts of Italy which were governed by that enlightened ruler of the Hohenstaufen family, Frederic II., King of Sicily and Roman Emperor. The cultivation of personal hygiene was also pursued very systematically during the later Middle Ages, the Regimen Salernitanum serving as the guide in such matters.

Taken all together the conditions in the physician's world were in anything but a promising state toward the end of the fifteenth century; but the dawn of better times, of modern medicine, was near at hand, and already signs of its approach were beginning to be recognizable in different parts of Western Europe.