th
regard to the Papal regulations or decrees of councils that are
claimed to have hampered surgery. President White and others have
insisted that the prohibition of surgery to monks and priests
prevented the development of surgery or was responsible for the low
state of surgical practice. Here once more we are in the presence of a
deduction, and not of an induction that represents the actual facts in
the case. Most students at the universities were clerks, that is, had
the privileges of clergymen, and were, as a rule, in minor orders. All
the great surgeons of this time, and they were many, were
ecclesiastics.

The climax of President White's treatment of the relationship of the
Church to surgery and of the intense opposition manifested by
ecclesiastics to surgical progress, and, I may add, the climax of
absurdity as far as the real history of surgery is concerned, comes in
the last paragraph of this portion of his chapter on From Miracles to
Medicine, which President White has placed under the title Theological
Opposition to Anatomical Studies. He says:

"So deeply was the idea rooted in the mind of the Universal Church
that for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable;
the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure an ordinary
surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a better beginning
was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany ordered that dishonor
should no longer attach to the surgical profession."

{170}

President White insists over and over again that whatever surgery
there was, and especially whatever progress was made in surgery, was
due to the Arabs, or at least to Arabian initiative. Gurlt, in his
History of Surgery, [Footnote 21] which we have referred to elsewhere,
is very far from sharing this view. I need scarcely say that Gurlt is
one of our best authorities in the history of surgery. In his sketch
of Roger, the first of the great Italian surgeons of the thirteenth
century who came after the foundation of the universities, Gurlt says
that, "though Arabian writings on surgery had been brought over to
Italy by Constantine Africanus a hundred years before Roger's time,
those exercised no influence over Italian surgery in the next century,
and there is not a trace of the surgical knowledge of the Arabs to be
found in Roger's work." His writing depends almost entirely upon the
surgical traditions of his time, the experience of his teachers and
colleagues, to w