Preserving Ancient Knowledge. For the first half of the Middle Ages there were no great leaps in medical treatment, but old knowledge was preserved and disseminated by monasteries, where monks copied and recopied works of the ancient authors. They also extracted and epitomized the ideas of these authors in antidotaria (collections of antidotes) and receptaria (collections of prescriptions) for restorative and preventative health, respectively. In order to preserve and extend this knowledge, a medical school was established in Salerno, south of Rome, in the ninth century. Other medical schools followed at Montpelier (1181) and Padua (1222). There were also medieval faculties at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford, founded in 1110, 1113, and 1167, respectively. Beginning in the twelfth century, as more and more ancient knowledge began to enter Europe, a desire to understand and extend the learning of the ancients (and their Arabic commentators...