Setting the Stage

The practice of medicine is as old as civilization itself, but the Greeks are generally credited with inventing the science of medicine—using observation and experience rather than appeals to supernatural forces to treat disease. Although Greek medical knowledge was passed on to the conquering Romans, it fell into obscurity as the Roman Empire collapsed in the early Middle Ages.
A period of stagnation in the sciences, combined with sporadic epidemics of the bubonic plague, smallpox, and other diseases, reinforced the turn toward superstition and magical treatments in medieval Europe. Only fragments of the ancient medical learning survived. Many people viewed disease as a form of punishment for sins or as the result of demonic forces. Prayer was a standard form of treatment.
Western medicine received a major boost when the Italian universities of Salerno, Bologna, and Padua established medical faculties in the 9th and 10th centuries. By the 12th century, the University of Paris in France and Oxford University in England had also founded faculties of medicine. These institutions provided facilities for research, set examination requirements for graduating physicians, and laid the foundations for the extraordinary revival of Western medicine in the 16th and 17th centuries—a revival that has continued to this day.
source: encarta encyclopedia