Montpellier is home to the oldest functioning faculty of medicine in the West. And all because of a seventeenth-century feudal lord, Guilhem VIII, who decreed that everybody had the right to study medicine in Montpellier, regardless of their religion or cultural precedence. The faculty was established within a medieval
monastery and papal palace, and has a library containing 5.6 miles of shelving laden with medicine books, and an incredible conservatory of anatomy with over 5,600 historical items, of inestimable artistic value. It can also claim famous scholars such as Nostradamus and Rabelais, who studied under its vaults.
