t is universally conceded to contain the last
words on the history of medical development. There is no doubt at all
about its absolute authoritativeness. President White has been calling
on his imagination; Professor Pagel has consulted original documents
in the history of surgery. He says:

{172}

"A more favorable star shone during the whole Middle Ages over
surgery than over practical medicine. The representatives of this
specialty succeeded earlier than did the practical physicians in
freeing themselves from the ban of scholasticism. In its development
a more constant and more even progress cannot fail to be seen. The
stream of literary works on surgery flows richer during this period.
While the surgeons are far from being able to emancipate themselves
from the ruling pathological theories, there is no doubt that in one
department, that of manual technics, free observation came to occupy
the first place in the effort for scientific progress. Investigation
is less hampered and concerns itself with practical things and not
with artificial theories. Experimental observation was in this not
repressed by an unfortunate and iron-bound appeal to reasoning." I
am tempted to add as a reflection, deduction was not allowed to
replace attention to facts, though it has in some supposed surgical
history of this period.

Pagel continues: "Indeed, the lack of so-called scholarship, the
freshness of view free from all prejudice with which surgery,
uninfluenced by scholastic presumption, was forced to enter upon the
objective consideration of things, while most of the surgeons
brought with them to their calling an earnest vocation in union with
great technical facility, caused surgery to enter upon ways in which
it secured, as I have said, greater relative success than did
practical medicine."

President White has evidently never bothered to look into a history of
surgery at all, or he would not have fallen into the egregious error
of saying that the period from 1200 to 1400 was barren of surgery, for
it is really one of the most important periods in the development of
{173} modern surgery. Further evidence as to this is rather easy to
obtain.

I have cited two German authorities in the history of medicine and
surgery. Here is an English writer who is quite as authoritative. In
the address on The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the
end of the Sixteenth Century, wh