whom much is known in the history
of medicine was Richard the Englishman, usually spoken of as Ricardus
Anglicus. He was the physician to the famous Pope Gregory IX.
(1237-1241). Richard, who was born in England not long before the
beginning of the thirteenth century, died shortly after the middle of
that century. For a time he was at Paris, and accordingly is sometimes
spoken of as Ricardus Parisiensis. According to Gabriel Naude he was
at Paris after the death of his patient, Gregory IX., and towards the
end of his life retired to the Abbey of St. Victor, to spend his last
days in recollection and prayer. In this he anticipated another great
English physician {206} with a European reputation--Linacre--who,
three centuries later, after having been the royal physician for many
years to King Henry VIII., became a clergyman. It is interesting to
realize that, early in history as Richard's life occurs, some works
attributed to him contain definite information with regard to anatomy.
Most of this, it is true, is taken from Hippocrates, Galen, and the
Arabs, but some of it seems to be the result of his own personal
experience, on the living, if not on the dead.

After Richard, the next of the physicians to the Popes who has an
important place in the history of medicine is the famous Thaddeus
Alderotti, who lived for more than eighty years during the thirteenth
century. He has the added interest for this generation of having been
a self-made man, for he was the son of very poor parents of the lowest
rank. Up to his thirtieth year he remained without any special
education. He made his living, it is said, by selling candles. Having
acquired a little competency, at the age of thirty he began with great
zeal the study of philosophy and of medicine, two sciences which in
the old days were supposed to go very well together, though,
unfortunately, they are often rigidly separated from each other in
later times. Fifteen years after he began the study of medicine we
hear of him as a medical teacher, and then ten years later he began to
be famous as a writer on all sorts of medical topics. He became the
physician of Pope Honorius IV., himself one of the most liberal and
broadly educated of men, and as the result of the confidence awakened
by his occupancy of this honorable position, he secured an immense
success in practice and made an enormous fortune. Alderotti's work
represents what is best in medicine for the whole of the thirteent