ctical--which so far at least in medical
history has always proved of only passing interest.

It is often said that at this time surgery was mainly in the hands of
barbers and the ignorant. Henri de Mondeville, however, is a striking
example in contradiction of this. He must have had a fine preliminary
education and his book shows very wide reading. There is almost no one
of any importance who seriously touched upon medicine or surgery before
his time whom Mondeville does not quote. Hippocrates, Aristotle,
Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, Rhazes, Ali Abbas, Abulcasis, Avicenna,
Constantine Africanus, Averroes, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Hugo of
Lucca, Theodoric, William of Salicet, Lanfranc are all quoted, and not
once or twice but many times. Besides he has quotations from the poets
and philosophers, Cato, Diogenes, Horace, Ovid, Plato, Seneca, and
others. He was a learned man, devoting himself to surgery.

It is no wonder, then, that he thought that a surgeon should be a
scholar, and that he needed to know much more than a physician. One of
his characteristic passages is that in which he declares "it is
impossible that a surgeon should be expert who does not know not only
the principles, but everything worth while knowing about medicine," and
then he added, "just as it is impossible for a man to be a good
physician who is entirely ignorant of the art of surgery." He says
further: "This our art of surgery, which is the third part of medicine
(the other two parts were diet and drugs), is, with all due reverence to
physicians, considered by us surgeons ourselves and by the non-medical
as a more certain, nobler, securer, more perfect, more necessary, and
more lucrative art than the other parts of medicine." Surgeons have
always been prone to glory in their specialty.

Mondeville had a high idea of the training that a surgeon should
possess. He says: "A surgeon who wishes to operate regularly ought first
for a long time to frequent places in which skilled surgeons operate
often, and he ought to pay careful attention to their operations and
commit their technique to memory. Then he ought to associate himself
with them in doing operations. A man cannot be a good surgeon unless he
knows both the art and science of medicine and especially anatomy. The
characteristics of a good surgeon are that he should be moderately bold,
not given to disputations before those who do not know medicine, operate
with foresight and wisdom, not beg