for the wounded, as did
Mondeville and many others. He uses sutures well and discreetly (p.
9), but with far too many salves. {183} On fractures of the skull he
is at his best; he noted the escape of cerebro-spinal fluid, and the
effect of pressure on the respiration. It is somewhat strange that
in days of war the study of chest wounds had been rather neglected
by Galen, Haly, and Avicenna; their practice, however, was to leave
them open, lest pus should gather about the heart. Theodoric and
Henry ordered chest wounds to be closed 'lest the vital spirits
escape.' Guy also closed these wounds, unless there were any
effusion to be removed. In empyema he objects to caustics and
prefers the knife. For haemorrhages he used sutures--a little too
closely perhaps--styptics, cautery or ligature. Sinuses he dilated
with tents of gentian root, or he incised them upon a director. On
ulcers his large experience is fully manifest. He describes the
carcinomatous kind as hopeless, unless the mass can be excised at a
very early stage and the incision followed by caustics. If in
fractures and dislocations he tells us nothing new, these sections
testify to a remarkable fulness of knowledge at a period when the
Hippocratic treatises were unknown. Haeser says that in respect of
position in fractured femur he was the best physician in the Middle
Ages."

[Illustration: Guy de Chauliac's Cauteries:--5, 6, 7, 8, cauteries
called from their shapes: knife, sword, olive, date kernel; 9, cautery
with protective nail to be inserted cold; 10, protective plate for
cauteries.]

[Illustration: Guy de Chauliac's Cauteries:--11, 12, long, smooth
cautery and canula protector; 13, 14, ring cautery with five buttons
and the protective plate with five openings.]

This is the period, it must not be forgotten, when, according to
President White, surgery was in such a state that _the application of
various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of the hangman cured
sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled poison; friction with a dead
man's tooth cured a toothache._ [Footnote 23]

[Footnote 23: Quite as curious notions as these which President White
mentions still exist in popular medicine in our own day. I have myself
known a man to blow the dried excrement of the dog into the throat of
his child suffering from diphtheria, and _he assured me that it cured
him_. In the country districts they still use ordure poul