of Bologna in the early fourteenth century.

X

GREAT SURGEONS OF THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES

Strange as it may appear to those who have not watched the development
of our knowledge of the Middle Ages in recent years the most interesting
feature in the medical departments and, indeed, of the post-graduate
work generally of the medieval universities, is that in surgery. There
is a very general impression that this department of medicine did not
develop until quite recent years, and that particularly it failed to
develop to any extent in the Middle Ages. A good many of the historians
of this period, indeed, though never the special historians of medicine,
have even gone far afield in order to find some reason why surgery did
not develop at this time. They have insisted that the Church by its
prohibition of the shedding of blood, first to monks and friars, and
then to the secular clergy, prevented the normal development of surgery.
Besides they add that Church opposition to anatomy completely precluded
all possibility of any genuine natural evolution of surgery as a
science.

There is probably no more amusing feature of quite a number of
supposedly respectable and presumably authoritative historical works
written in English than this assumption with regard to the absence of
surgery during the later Middle Ages. Only the most complete ignorance
of the actual history of medicine and surgery can account for it. The
writers who make such assertions must never have opened an authoritative
medical history. Nothing illustrates so well the expression of the
editors of the "Cambridge Modern History" referred to more than once in
these pages that "in view of changes and of gains such as these [the
jointing of original documents] it has become impossible for historical
writers of the present day to trust without reserve even to the most
respected secondary authority. The honest student finds himself
continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of historical
literature." Fortunately for us this sweeping condemnation does not hold
to any great extent for the medical historical classics. All of the
classic historians of medicine tell us much of the surgery of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in recent years the
republication of old texts and the further study of manuscript documents
of various kinds have made it very clear that there is almost no period
in the history of the world when surgery was so t