Matteo Silvatico, a doctor from Salerno, author of important treatises on medicinal herbs, was physician to Robert of Anjou and founder of the Garden of Minerva.
1245
1342
Medico, botanico
Matteo Silvatico (1245-1342), physician to Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, brought the fame of the Medical School into the century of Boccaccio, who was to be a friend of his and who portrayed him in a novella, the X of Day IV, under the name of Mazzeo della Montagna: “You must know, therefore, beautiful young women,” writes Boccaccio, making his gaudy youth recount, “that still it is not long that in Salerno there was a very great doctor in cirugia, whose name was master Mazzeo della Montagna, who, already near his last old age, having taken for wife a beautiful and gentle young woman of his city.
Matteo therefore is an important character; Boccaccio does not make him look good in the novella by treating him as a cuckold, but one knows the spirit of the great Tuscan. In fact, horns aside, Matteo is the author of important texts that would be transcribed and later printed in the 16th century, among them the’Opus Pandectarum Medicinae: a scientific treatise on herbs and their use in medicine.
Of herbs, in fact, Matthew was a great expert, so great that he founded that Garden of Minerva that can still be visited today and was organized according to the principles of Galen’s medicine, later revived in the Middle Ages and taught at the Salerno Medical School. Simples, i.e., plants and shrubs essential for the preparation of medicines, were cultivated to compensate for illnesses, which according to the medicine of the time indicated imbalances between the humors and thus diseases. Medicines were intended to compensate for the surges and restore balance.
