s the most read volume of the
time in medicine. Evidently the career of such a man is of import, not
alone to physicians, but to all who are interested in the history of
education.

Chauliac derives his name from the little town of Chauliac in the
diocese of Mende, almost in the centre of what is now the department of
Lozere. The records of births and deaths were not considered so
important in the fourteenth century as they are now, and so we are not
sure of either in the case of Chauliac. It is usually considered that he
was born some time during the last decade of the thirteenth century,
probably toward the end of it, and that he died about 1370. Of his early
education we know nothing, but it must have been reasonably efficient,
since it gave him a good working knowledge of Latin, which was the
universal language of science and especially of medicine at that time;
and though his own style, as must be expected, is no better than that of
his contemporaries, he knew how to express his thoughts clearly in
straightforward Latin, with only such a mixture of foreign terms as his
studies suggested and the exigencies of a new development of science
almost required. Later in life he seems to have known Arabic very well,
for he is evidently familiar with Arabian books and does not depend
merely on translations of them.

Pagel, in the first volume of Puschmann's "Handbook of the History of
Medicine," says, on the authority of Nicaise and others, that Chauliac
received his early education from the village clergyman. His parents
were poor, and but for ecclesiastical interest in him it would have been
difficult for him to obtain his education. The Church supplied at that
time to a great extent for the foundations and scholarships, home and
travelling, of our day, and Chauliac was amongst the favored ones. How
well he deserved the favor his subsequent career shows, as it completely
justifies the judgment of his patrons. He went first to Toulouse, as we
know from his affectionate mention of one of his teachers there.
Toulouse was more famous for law, however, than for medicine, and after
a time Chauliac sought Montpellier to complete his medical studies.

For English-speaking people an added interest in Guy de Chauliac will be
the fact that one of his teachers at Montpellier was Bernard Gordon,
very probably a Scotchman, who taught for some thirty-five years at this
famous university in the south of France, and died near the end of