"The ancients mention many medicaments, which draw out the
teeth without iron instruments or which make them more easy to
draw out; such as the milky juice of the tithymal with
pyrethrum, the roots of the mulberry and caper, citrine
arsenic, aqua fortis, the fat of forest frogs. But these
remedies promise much and accomplish but little--_mais ils
donnent beaucoup de promesses, et peu, d'operations_."

It is no wonder that Chauliac has been enthusiastically praised. Nicaise
has devoutly gathered many of these praises into a sheaf of eulogies at
the end of his biography of the great French surgeon. He tells us that
Fallopius compared him to Hippocrates. John Calvo of Valencia, who
translated the "Great Surgery" into Spanish, looks upon him as the first
law-giver of surgery. Freind, the great English physician, in 1725
called him the Prince of Surgeons. Ackermann said that Guy de Chauliac's
text-book will take the place of all that has been written on the
subject down to his time, so that even if all the other works had been
lost his would replace them. Dezimeris, commenting on this, says that
"if one should take this appreciation literally, this surgeon of the
fourteenth century would be the first and, up to the present time, the
only author who ever merited such an eulogy." "At least," he adds, "we
cannot refuse him the distinction of having made a work infinitely
superior to all those which appeared up to this time and even for a long
time afterwards. Posterity rendered him this justice, for he was for
three centuries the classic _par excellence_. He rendered the study easy
and profitable, and all the foreign nations the tributaries of our
country." Peyrihle considered Guy's "Surgery" as the most valuable and
complete work of all those of the same kind that had been published
since Hippocrates and added that the reading of it was still useful in
his time in 1784. Begin, in his work on Ambroise Pare, says "that Guy
has written an immortal book to which are attached the destinies of
French surgeons." Malgaigne, in his "History of Surgery," does not
hesitate to say, "I do not fear to say that, Hippocrates alone excepted,
there is not a single treatise on surgery,--Greek, Latin, or
Arabic,--which I place above, or even on the same level with, this
magnificent work, 'The Surgery of Guy de Chauliac.'" Daremberg said,
"Guy seems to us a surgeon above all erudite, yet expert and without
ever