Europe’s First Great Medical School, and the Jew Who Contributed to Its Main Textbook

In her Etzem column this week, Devorah Goldman argues that beneath controversies about everything from sex-change surgeries to the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic are fundamental questions about what the purpose of medicine is, and the unique ethical obligations that doctors have toward their patients. Such a concept of the duties of physicians itself depends on the emergence of medicine as a distinct discipline and profession. In Europe, this idea of what it means to be a doctor owes much to the medical school established in Salerno in the 9th century—founded, according to legend, by a Jew, a Muslim, a Greek, and an Italian.