Adala (a Saracen), and Salernus (a Roman) as its founders, but there is no evidence of the epoch to which this refers. Although other subjects were taught at Salerno, it became specially noted for its medical school, and in the ninth century it had assumed the title of Civitas Hippocratica. William of Normandy resorted to Salerno prior to his conquest of England, and a dietetic treatise in verse exists dedicated to his son Robert. It has been claimed that the works of Hippocrates and Galen were studied at Salerno from its earliest days, but so far as this was the case it was by the intermediary of Jewish doctors, who themselves derived their knowledge from Arab sources, that these were available. The original texts of the Greek and Latin authors were not in the hands of European scholars till Aldus of Venice began to reproduce them early in the sixteenth century.
The pharmaceutical knowledge to which the famous school attained may be judged by the reputation which attended the Antidotary of Nicolas Prepositus, who was director of the school in the first half of the twelfth century. In this Antidotary are found the absurd formulas pretending to have been invented or used by the Apostle Paul and others. "Sal Sacerdotale quo utebantur sacerdotales tempore Heliae prophetae" is among these. In the course of the next century or two medical students from England, Germany, Italy, and France went to Cordova, Toledo, and Seville, and there wrote translations of the medical works used in those schools. These translations by the end of the thirteenth century were so universally accepted as to eclipse Salerno, which from then began to decline in fame, Bologna, Montpellier, Padua, and Leyden gradually partitioning among themselves its old reputation. But
