University of Montpellier School of Medicine

The stone facade of the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier, France, with two bronze statues flanking its doorway. The school has occupied this former Saint-Benoît monastery since 1795. Montpellier's medical school counts from August 17, 1220, when Cardinal Conrad of Urach, a papal legate, granted the community of medical masters and students its first charter. The wider University of Montpellier followed on October 26, 1289, with Pope Nicholas IV's constitution Quia Sapientia. The university calls this the oldest continuously operating school of medicine in the world, a claim that depends on counting a single faculty rather than a whole university.