ABSTRACT
The practice of medicine in the early centuries of the Middle Ages was particularly reserved for the ecclesiastics, up to the period in which the school of Salerno became predominantly lay in character. Although the medical value of the work of Constantine is slight, he was greatly admired well into the Middle Ages as the Magister Orientis et Occidentis. At the beginning of the Renaissance it might well have seemed that medical thought had disappeared with the Roman civilization, or that it had migrated to distant parts to return later with the medicine of the Arabians. Montecassino acquired great fame throughout the West and the teaching of medicine was spread by the Benedictines to the monasteries scattered over Europe. At the height of the troubles produced by the foreign invasions, a centre of scholarly study arose in the most distant part of Western Christianity — in Ireland, where Christianity had been introduced in the fifth century by Saint Patrick.
