ABSTRACT
Europe universities offer an excellent opportunity to examine the development of medicine and medical education in what is a relatively obscure period and, in most textbooks, unexplored territory. The German universities and their foundations fall neatly into four chronological groups. For the most part, too, the earliest surviving statutes and regulations for a medical faculty are considerably later than the university's foundation charter, which points to the relative unimportance of the medical professors within the university structures. Even at Erfurt, where a member of the medical faculty was chosen as Rector twenty times between 1394 and 1500 this may have been much more because of the doctor's contacts with the rulers of Saxony and Thuringia and his small teaching commitments than because of any faculty power-base or respect for medicine. Indeed, the numbers of medical graduates were rarely great enough to demand the immediate creation of a specific medical faculty.
