sidered
indispensable for scholars. The first edition of the "Great Surgery" was
printed in 1478 at Lyons. Printing had only been introduced there five
years before. This first edition, _primus primarius_ or _editio
princeps_, was a French translation by Nicholas Panis. In 1480 an
Italian edition was printed at Venice. The first Latin edition was
printed also in Venice in 1490.

It would be only natural to expect that the successors of Guy de
Chauliac, and especially those who had come personally in contact with
him, would take advantage of his thorough work to make still further
advances in surgery. As matter of fact, decadence in surgery is noted
immediately after his death. Three men taught at the University of
Montpellier at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the
fifteenth century, John de Tornamira, Valesco de Taranta, and John
Faucon. They cannot be compared, Gurlt says, with Guy de Chauliac,
though they were physicians of reputation in their time. Faucon made a
compendium of Guy's work for students. Somehow there seemed to be the
impression that surgery had now reached a point of development beyond
which it could not advance. Unfortunate political conditions, wars, the
withdrawal of the Popes from Avignon to Rome, and other disturbances,
distracted men's minds, and surgery deteriorated to a considerable
extent, until the new spirit at the time of the Renaissance came to
inject fresh life into it.

XII

MEDIEVAL DENTISTRY--GIOVANNI OF ARCOLI

If there is one phase of our present-day medicine and surgery that most
of us are likely to be quite sure is of very recent development it is
dentistry. Probably most people would declare at once that they had
every reason to think that the science and art of dentistry, as we have
it now, developed for the first time in the world's history during the
last generation or two. It is extremely interesting to realize then, in
the light of this almost universal persuasion, founded to a great extent
on the conviction that man is in process of evolution and that as a
consequence we must surely be doing things now that men never did
before, to find that dentistry, both as an art and science, is old; that
it has developed at a number of times in the world's history, and that
as fortunately for history its work was done mainly in indestructible
materials, the teeth themselves and metal prosthetic apparatus, we have
actual specimens of what was accomplished at a