emptuously of St. Come, it
must be admitted that the college was in a false position
throughout. In aping the Faculty of Medicine, it lost the touch of
mother earth without gaining any harbourage in the deep waters of
the proud. Nay, such is the Nemesis of pride, the barbers came to
command the position. It did not suit the Faculty to see the barbers
weakened; for in their weakness lay the strength of the surgeons of
St. Come, who sought incessantly to appear as lettered clerks, to
attach their college to the university, and even to claim a place
beside the Faculty itself. To bring St. Come to its knees, and to
check the presumptuous claims of this corporation on the {196}
privileges of the Faculty of Medicine, on a liberal education in
arts and medicine, on a place in the university, on the suppression
of unqualified surgical practice, and less, honourably, on relief
from handicraft and urgent calls, the Faculty had to coquette with
the barbers. Medicine, proclaimed the Faculty when it suited its
purpose, contains the theoretical and the practical side of surgery;
a surgeon is therefore but the servant of a physician. If St. Come
sought to provide lectures in surgery, the Faculty, which kept
possession of teaching licenses and desired in the surgeon a docile
assistant, took the teaching from the college and invited the
barbers to lectures of its own. In their duplicity and conceit of
caste, physicians of the Faculty condescended even to publish books
on surgery, books as arid and as insincere as their lectures. On the
other hand, in the person of the King's Barber, the barbers had a
secret and potent influence at Court. The Faculty persisted in
denying to St. Come all 'esoteric' teaching, all diagnosis, and all
use of medical therapeutics. Aristotle was pronounced to be
unfavorable to the 'vulgarizing of science.' Joubert was attacked
for editing Guy, but replied with dignity (in the notes of his
edition). While the Faculty thus tried to prevent the access to
letters of a presumptuous body of artisans, St. Come in mimic
arrogance disdained the barbers, sought to deny them the name of
surgeon, and was jealous of the diffusion of technical knowledge
among them in the vernacular tongue." [Footnote 26]

[Footnote 26: As showing how professional jealously may exist in
such ways in the modern times as to hinder progress, the following
paragraph,