sition that had arisen between
physicians and surgeons in his time and their failure to realize that
they were both members of a great profession, he enumerates the many
different kinds of opponents that the medical profession had. There were
"barbers, soothsayers, loan agents, falsifiers, alchemists, meretrices,
midwives, old women, converted Jews, Saracens, and indeed most of those
who, having wasted their substance foolishly, now proceed to make
physicians or surgeons of themselves in order to make their living under
the cloak of healing."

What surprises Mondeville however, as it has always surprised every
physician who knows the situation, is that so many educated, or at least
supposedly well-informed people of the better classes, indeed even of
the so-called best classes, allow themselves to be influenced by these
quacks. And it is even more surprising to him that so many well-to-do,
intelligent people should, for no reason, though without knowledge,
presume to give advice in medical matters and especially in even
dangerous surgical diseases, and in such delicate affections as diseases
of the eyes. "It thus often happens that diseases in themselves curable
grow to be simply incurable or are made much worse than they were
before." He says that some of the clergymen of his time seemed to think
that a knowledge of medicine is infused into them with the sacrament of
Holy Orders. He was himself probably a clergyman, and I have in the
modern time more than once known of teachers in the clerical seminaries
emphasizing this same idea for the clerical students. It is very evident
that the world has not changed very much, and that to know any time
reasonably well is to find in it comments on the morning paper. We are
in the midst of just such a series of interferences with medicine on the
part of the clergy as this wise, common-sense surgeon of the thirteenth
century deprecated.

In every way Mondeville had the instincts of a teacher. He took
advantage of every aid. He was probably the first to use illustrations
in teaching anatomy. Guy de Chauliac, whose teacher in anatomy for some
time Mondeville was, says in the first chapter of his "Chirurgia Magna"
that pictures do not suffice for the teaching of anatomy and that actual
dissection is necessary. The passage runs as follows: "In the bodies of
men, of apes, and of pigs, and of many other animals, tissues should be
studied by dissections and not by pictures, as did Henric