Virtual Museum of the Salerno Medical School

The Virtual Museum of the Salerno Medical School is located in via Mercanti in the church of San Gregorio, in the heart of the historic center of Salerno.

Through a modern multimedia path, the museum traces the history and key moments of the Salerno Medical School.

The Salerno Medical School was founded in the early Middle Ages, is considered the precursor of the modern university, and was the first medieval medical institution in Europe.

The foundation of the Salerno medical school represents the keystone of medical history, because with the method based on practice and experience it paved the way for the empirical method and the prevention of diseases.

Furthermore, a crucial role in the medical school was played by the “female doctors” also known as Mulieres Salernitanae, of which Trotula de Ruggiero was a member, to whom we owe the treatise De passionibus mulierum ante in et post partum which marks the birth of obstetrics and gynecology as medical sciences.

The virtual museum retraces the stages of the medical school through films, reconstructions, reproductions of manuscript codices, such as the famous Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a scientific, educational and popular text in Latin dating back to the 12th-13th century, which contained hygiene rules, indications on food and medicinal herbs.