is thought was excusable some years ago when the old
medical text-books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had not
as yet been printed.

At the present time, such a mistake would be unpardonable for any
scholar who pretends to first-hand knowledge of this period. In the
chapter on Science at the Medieval Universities I call special
attention to the fact that medicine and surgery developed in such a
wonderful way at the medical schools of the universities of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that many presumed discoveries of
much later times were marvelously anticipated. A short catalogue of
them here may not be out of place, though the reader is referred to
other chapters for further details. In the medical schools which Pope
John XXII. was then fostering, they taught the ligature of arteries,
the prevention of bleeding by pressure, the danger of wounds of the
neck, the relation of dropsy to hardening of the kidneys, the true
origins of the venereal diseases, the methods of treating {157} joint
diseases, the suture of divided nerves, the use of the knife rather
than the cautery because it made a cleaner wound which healed more
readily, and even, wonder of wonders, healing by first intention.
Anyone who was fostering this kind of education in medicine was
advancing the cause of one of the applied sciences in a very wonderful
way.

If we add that, at this same time the proper use of opium in medicine
was a feature of medical teaching which had just been introduced by a
Papal physician, while a form of anaesthesia was being practically
developed and very generally employed, the question will be why we, in
the twentieth century, do not know ever so much more than we actually
do, rather than why these earnest students of the thirteenth century
knew so little, which is the absurd thought that most authorities in
education seem to entertain at the present time with regard to our
forbears of early university history. The student of medicine during
the thirteenth century had to devote himself very nearly to the same
department of science as those which occupy his colleagues of the
present century.

The prospectus of a medical school of the time would announce very
probably some such program of studies as this. Besides learning
something of astrology (the astronomy of the day) the student would be
expected to know much about climate and its influence on disease, and
about soil in its relation to pathology (thes