ssion for an hour, or in severe cases ligature. His master had
studied wounds of the neck. Lanfranc has a magnificent chapter on
injuries of the head, which Professor Allbutt does not hesitate to
call one of the classics of surgery. Lanfranc was thoroughly
appreciated by his contemporaries. After years of study and teaching
in Italy he was invited to Paris, where he became one of the lights of
that great university. Both Salicet and Lanfranc did their wonderful
work in scientific medicine down in Italy where ecclesiastical
influence was strongest. Italy continued to be for the next six
centuries always the home of the best medical schools in the world, to
which the most ardent students from {8} all over the continent and
even England went for the sake of the magnificent opportunities
provided. It was literally true, in spite of the tradition of Church
opposition to medical science, that the nearer to Rome the university
the better its medical school; and as we shall see, Rome itself had
the best medical school in the world for two centuries, while its
greatest rival, often ahead of it in scientific achievement, always
its peer, was the medical school of Bologna in the Papal States,
directly under the control of the Popes since the beginning of the
sixteenth century.

Dr. White has said just the opposite of this in a well-known passage
of his book, in which he assures his readers that "in proportion as
the grasp of theology upon education tightened, medicine declined; and
in proportion as that grasp relaxed, medicine has been developed." The
reason for such a statement is that he knew nothing about the history
of medicine and surgery in these medieval centuries and thought there
was none. This is a characteristic example of his mode of writing the
History of the (Supposed) Warfare of Theology with Science in
Christendom. This much will give some idea of the value of his book as
a work of reference.

After knowing something of these wonderful developments of medieval
medical science, it is to be hoped that no one will listen hereafter
to the ignorant assertions of those who talk of the suppression of
medical knowledge at this time. _William of Salicet and Lanfranc were
both of them clerics,_ that is, they belonged to the ecclesiastical
body and had taken minor orders, though they were not priests, as
priests were for obvious reasons not allowed to do surgical
operations, it being as repugnant to human feelings in the Mi