uch serious matters as fractures, calculi and difficult parturition,
in which modern science has achieved some of its greatest triumphs,
were dealt with by relics," and when "there were religious scruples
against dissection," and surgery "was denounced by the Church," and
when "pastoral medicine had checked all scientific effort in medical
science." And the reflection was made by a chamberlain of the Papal
household.]

"Thence he paid a brief visit to Paris, where for a moment, by the
renown of Lanfranc, Jean Pitard, and Henry of Mondeville, surgery
was in the ascendant. For the moment the Church and the faculty had
not succeeded in paralyzing the scientific arm of medicine.
[Footnote 25] {187} Guy began practice in Lyons, whence he was
called to Avignon by Clement VI. as 'venerabilis et circumspectus
vir, dominus Guido de Cauliaco, canonicus et propositus ecclesiae
Sancti Justi Lugduni, medicusque domini nostri Papae.' In Avignon he
stayed, while other physicians fled, to minister to the victims of
the plague (A.D., 1348), and he may have attended Laura in spite of
Petrarch's tirades against all physicians and even against Guy
himself. His description of this epidemic is terrible in its naked
simplicity. He did not, indeed, himself escape, for he had an attack
with bubo, and was ill for six weeks. He gave succor also in a later
epidemic in Avignon, in 1360. His 'Chirurgia Magna' or Inventarium
seu Collectorium Artis Chirurgicalis Medicinae--so called in
distinction to the meagre little handbooks or Chirurgiae Parvae
compiled from the larger treatises--was in preparation in 1363.
This great work I have studied carefully, and not without prejudice;
and yet I cannot wonder that Fallopius compared the author to
Hippocrates, or that John Freind calls him the Prince of Surgeons.
It is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise. _As a clerk_ he wrote
in Latin, in the awkward hybrid tongue that medical Latin then was,
containing many Arabian, Provencal and French words, but very little
Greek."

[Footnote 25: It is worthy of remark, how even Prof. Allbutt, in a
passage like this, where he is providing abundant material for the
contradiction of the English Protestant tradition of the supposed
opposition of the Church to science, and especially to surgery, yet
cannot break away from the influence of that tradition entirely. It
has been bred in him, and even while showing its falsity