be. He says that, after the
time of the Arabs, who were all both physicians and surgeons, either
because of the lack of interest of {193} physicians or their laziness,
for the practice of surgery is a difficult matter, or because they
came to be too much occupied with the ills which they might hope to
cure by medicines alone, surgery became separated from medicine and
passed down into the hands of mere mechanics. This is a complaint not
infrequently heard even at the present day, that medicine and surgery
are drawing too much apart for the good of either specialty. Both the
Regius Professors of medicine in England have recently insisted that
physicians must oftener be present at operations if they would really
appreciate the value of diagnosis, while there has been for many years
a feeling that surgery would be benefitted if surgeons did not always
wish to have recourse to the knife, but appreciated how much good
might be accomplished by other remedial measures. The great French
Father of Surgery, then, was only expressing what was to be a
perennial complaint in the domain of medicine and surgery when he
explained the separation of the two departments of healing. He has
nothing whatever to say of the evil influence upon surgery of any
Church regulations, though he must have been in a position to realize
their significance very well in this respect if they actually had any.
He was himself, as we have said, a member of the Papal household; he
was even a cleric, and seems to have encountered no difficulty at all
not only in devoting himself to surgery, but even in lifting up that
department of medicine from the slough of neglect into which it had
fallen because of the lack of initiative of preceding generations in
his native land.

It may be wondered, then, how the tradition of opposition to surgery,
which is so common in history, had its origin. Nearly always for these
exaggerated stories {194} there is some basis of truth. For instance,
with regard to the opposition to Vesalius, the origin of the stories
of persecution by the Church and ecclesiastical authorities is
evidently the fact that he was very much opposed by the old-time
physicians and surgeons, who believed in Galen and thought it worse
than heresy to break with him. It is the opposition of scientists, or
pseudo-scientists, to scientific progress that constitutes the real
bar to advance, and has over and over again been attributed to
religious motives, when it