by
his contemporaries and immediate successors as the most cultured of
the surgeons. Whatever he wrote bears the traces of his wide reading
and of his respect for authority, yet shows also his power to make
observations for himself, and his name is due much more to his
independent work both in the technics and the diagnostics of surgery,
than to his reputation for scholarship or the depth of his culture.
Lanfranc (whose name was Lanfranchi) had been an Italian. Mondeville
was born in Normandy sometime about the beginning of the last quarter
of the thirteenth century. The place of his education is not
absolutely sure, but there is good authority for saying that he was,
for a time at least, in Bologna. On his return from Italy he passed
some time, just at the beginning of the fourteenth century, in
Montpelier. He seems to have looked for a professorship at Montpelier,
but instead received the appointment as surgeon to the French king,
Philip Le Bel. This brought him to Paris, where the first portion of
his book on surgery was written about 1306. This was not completed
until 1312. His work was interrupted by several campaigns on which he
attended {178} the king along the Northern coast. When he again took
up his work of writing, he revised what he had written at first by the
light of the experience that he had acquired in the campaign. Pagel
says that his style is lively and clear and often full of meat. Many
of his own opinions and experiences are incorporated in his work, and
in spite of his tendency to display his erudition by quotations, his
originality is not seriously interfered with.

Some of his remarks are very curiously interesting to the modern. He
seems to have had the idea that portions of metal which had penetrated
the body as the result of explosions, for gun-powder was already being
used, might be removed by means of a magnet. He would not have been a
distinguished surgeon without inventing a needle-holder, and
accordingly we find that he was one of the first of a long line of
such inventors. He invented certain instruments also for the removal
of arrow-heads, which because of their form and hooks become firmly
imbedded in the tissues. Mondeville had no such fear of trephining as
Lanfranc had, though he did not hesitate to emphasize the value of
expectant treatment in most of these cases of injury to the head that
might seem at first to demand the trephine.

Pagel notes the fact that when he prescribed d