tices for
sprains of various kinds, and I have known doctors prescribe them. I
have seen an intelligent woman smoking dried angleworms in a pipe for
toothache. I sincerely hope, however, that no serious(!) historian of
the twenty-fifth century will gather up side remarks like the present
with regard to such curious customs--real superstitions that have
nothing to do with religion, as most supersititions have not--and
state them as showing the ignorance of our generation, and above all
as indicating the low state of medicine in our time.]

{184}

Lest it should be thought that possibly Professor Allbutt had been
rather partial to the great Father of Modern Surgery in his enthusiasm
for these medieval surgeons, it seems worth while to compress here
something of what Pagel has to say with regard to this great man, who
represents in himself a full hundred years of progress in surgery. He
wrote an immense text-book of surgery, from which his teaching may be
learned with absolute authenticity. The great significance attached to
Guy's writings by his contemporaries and successors will be readily
appreciated from the immense number of manuscript copies, original
editions in print, and the many translations which are extant. This
monument of scientific surgery has for dedication a sentence that
would alone and of itself obliterate all the nonsense that has been
talked about Papal opposition to the development of surgery. It runs
as follows:--

(I dedicate this work) "To you my masters, physicians of Montpelier,
Bologna, Paris, and Avignon, especially you of the Papal Court with
whom I have been associated in the service of the Roman Pontiffs. The
exact words as given by Pagel are "Vobis dominis meis medicis
Montispessulani, Bononiae, Parisiis atque Avinionis, praecipue
papalibus, quibus me in servitio Romanorum pontificum associavi."

Pagel has three closely printed pages in small type of titles alone of
subjects which Chauliac treated with {185} distinction. His
description of instruments and methods of operation is especially full
and suggestive. He knew how to prescribe manipulations and set forth
the principles on which they were founded. Scarcely anything was added
to his method of taxis for hernia for five centuries after his time.
He describes the passage of a catheter with the accuracy and complete
technic of a man who knew all the difficulties of it in complicated
conditions. He recognizes the dangers that arise fo