ich Professor Clifford Allbutt, the
Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, delivered
by special invitation at the Congress of Arts and Sciences of St.
Louis in 1904, this distinguished authority in the history of medicine
had much to say with regard to the wonderful development of surgery in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is, during the period
when, if we were to accept President White's declarations, surgery
either did not exist, or else had been relegated to such mere
handicraftsmen that no real scientific progress in it could possibly
be expected. As Professor Allbutt was trying only to give a twentieth
century audience some idea of the magnificent work that had been
accomplished by fellow members of his profession of medicine seven
centuries before, and had no idea of discussing the influence,
favorable or otherwise, of the Church upon the progress of medical
science, I have preferred to quote directly from this address for
evidence of the surgery of these centuries, than to gather the details
from many sources, when it might perhaps be thought that I was making
out a more favorable case than actually existed, for the sake of the
Church and the Popes.

"Both for his own great merits as an original and independent
observer and as the master of Lanfranc, William Salicet (Gugliemo
Salicetti of Piacenza, in Latin G. Placentinus or de Saliceto--now
Cadeo) was eminent {174} among the great Italian physicians of the
latter half of the thirteenth century. Now, these great Italians
were as distinguished in surgery as in medicine, and William was one
of the protestants of the period against the division of surgery
from inner medicine--a division which he regarded as a separation of
medicine from intimate touch with nature. Like Lanfranc and the
other great surgeons of the Italian tradition, and unlike Franco and
Pare, he had the advantage of the liberal university education of
Italy; but, like Pare and Wuertz, he had large practical experience
in hospital and in the battlefield. He practiced first at Bologna,
afterwards in Verona. William fully recognized that surgery cannot
be learned from books only. His surgery contains many case
histories, for he rightly opined that good notes of cases are the
soundest foundation of good practice; and in this opinion and method
Lanfranc followed him. William discovered that dropsy may be due to
a "durities renum"; h