Doctor Cherubino.  May he send your soul to eternal perdition, For your Treatise on the Irregular Verbs!

          (They rush out fighting.  Two Scholars come in.)

First Scholar.  Monte Cassino, then, is your College.  What think you of ours here at Salern?

Second Scholar.  To tell the truth, I arrived so lately,
I hardly yet have had time to discern. 
So much, at least, I am bound to acknowledge: 
The air seems healthy, the buildings stately,
And on the whole I like it greatly.

First Scholar.  Yes, the air is sweet; the Calabrian hills
Send us down puffs of mountain air;
And in summer time the sea-breeze fills
With its coolness cloister, and court, and square. 
Then at every season of the year
There are crowds of guests and travellers here;
Pilgrims, and mendicant friars, and traders
From the Levant, with figs and wine,
And bands of wounded and sick Crusaders,
Coming back from Palestine.

Second Scholar.  And what are the studies you pursue?  What is the course you here go through?

First Scholar.  The first three years of the college course Are given to Logic alone, as the source Of all that is noble, and wise, and true.

Second Scholar.  That seems rather strange, I must confess.  In a Medical School; yet, nevertheless, You doubtless have reasons for that.

First Scholar.  Oh yes! 
For none but a clever dialectician
Can hope to become a great physician;
That has been settled long ago. 
Logic makes an important part
Of the mystery of the healing art;
For without it how could you hope to show
That nobody knows so much as you know? 
After this there are five years more
Devoted wholly to medicine,
With lectures on chirurgical lore,
And dissections of the bodies of swine,
As likest the human form divine.

  Second Scholar.  What are the books now most in vogue?

First Scholar.  Quite an extensive catalogue;
Mostly, however, books of our own;
As Gariopontus’ Passionarius,
And the writings of Matthew Platearius;
And a volume universally known
As the Regimen of the School of Salern,
For Robert of Normandy written in terse
And very elegant Latin verse. 
Each of these writings has its turn. 
And when at length we have finished these,
Then comes the struggle for degrees,
With all the oldest and ablest critics;
The public thesis and disputation,
Question, and answer, and explanation
Of a passage out of Hippocrates,
Or Aristotle’s Analytics. 
There the triumphant Magister stands! 
A book is solemnly placed in his hands,
On which he swears to follow the rule
And ancient forms of the good old School;
To report if any confectionarius
Mingles his drugs with matters various,
And to visit his patients twice a day,