the Middle Ages at once
disappear after a careful study of his career. The idea of the careful
application of scientific principles in a great practical way is far
removed from the ordinary notion of medieval procedure. Some
observations we may concede that they did make, but we are inclined to
think that these were not regularly ordered and the lessons of them not
drawn so as to make them valuable as experiences. Great art men may have
had, but science and, above all, applied science, is a later development
of humanity. Particularly is this supposed to be true with regard to the
science and practice of surgery, which is assumed to be of comparatively
recent origin. Nothing could well be less true, and if the thoroughly
practical development of surgery may be taken as a symbol of how capable
men were of applying science and scientific principles, then it is
comparatively easy to show that the men of the later Middle Ages were
occupied very much as have been our recent generations with science and
its practical applications.

The immediate evidence of the value of old-time surgery is to be found
in the fact that Guy de Chauliac, who is commonly spoken of in the
history of medicine as the Father of Modern Surgery, lived his
seventy-odd years of life during the fourteenth century and accomplished
the best of his work, therefore, some five centuries before surgery in
our modern sense of the term is supposed to have developed. A glance at
his career, however, will show how old are most of the important
developments of surgery, as also in what a thoroughly scientific temper
of mind this subject was approached more than a century before the close
of the Middle Ages. The life of this French surgeon, indeed, who was a
cleric and occupied the position of chamberlain and
physician-in-ordinary to three of the Avignon Popes, is not only a
contradiction of many of the traditions as to the backwardness of our
medieval forbears in medicine, that are readily accepted by many
presumably educated people, but it is the best possible antidote for
that insistent misunderstanding of the Middle Ages which attributes
profound ignorance of science, almost complete failure of observation,
and an absolute lack of initiative in applications of science to the men
of those times.

Guy de Chauliac's life is modern in nearly every phase. He was educated
in a little town of the south of France, made his medical studies at
Montpellier, and then went on