his early
date.

We are so accustomed to think that anaesthesia was discovered about the
middle of the nineteenth century in America that we forget that
literature is full of references in Tom Middleton's (seventeenth
century) phrase to "the mercies of old surgeons who put their patients
to sleep before they cut them." Anaesthetics were experimented with
almost as zealously, during the latter half of the thirteenth century at
least, as during the latter half of the nineteenth century. They were
probably not as successful as we are, but they did succeed in producing
insensibility to pain, otherwise they could never have operated to the
extent they did. Moreover the traditions show that the Da Luccas
particularly had invented a method that left very little to be desired
in this matter of anaesthesia. A reference to the sketch of Guy de
Chauliac in this volume will show how practical the method was in his
time.

Nearly the same story as with regard to anaesthetics has to be repeated
for what are deemed so surely modern developments,--asepsis and
antisepsis. I have already suggested that Roger seems to have known how
extremely important it was to approach operations upon the skull with
the most absolute cleanliness. There are many hints of the same kind in
other writers which show that this was no mere accidental remark, but
was a definite conclusion derived from experience and careful
observation of results. We find much more with regard to this same
subject in the writings of the group of northern Italian surgeons and
especially in the group of those associated with William of Salicet.
Professor Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Medicine at the
University of Cambridge, England, in his address before the St. Louis
World's Fair Congress of Arts and Science in 1904, did not hesitate to
declare that William discussed the causes for union by first intention
and the modes by which it might be obtained. He, too, insisted on
cleanliness as the most important factor in having good surgical
results, and all of this group of men, in operating upon septic cases,
used stronger wine as a dressing. This exerted, as will be readily
understood, a very definite antiseptic quality.

Evidently some details of the teaching of this group of great surgeons
in northern Italy in the second half of the thirteenth century will make
clearer to us how much the rising universities of the time were
accomplishing in medicine and surgery as well