University of Paris, said not long
ago: "The therapeutics of any generation is quite absurd to the second
succeeding generation." We shall not blame the medieval generations for
having accepted remedies that afterwards proved inert, for every
generation has done that, even our own.

Their study of medicine was not without lasting accomplishment, however.
They laid down the indications and the dosage for opium. They used iron
with success, they tried out many of the bitter tonics among the herbal
medicines, and they used laxatives and purgatives to good advantage.
Down at Montpellier, Gilbert, the Englishman, suggested red light for
smallpox because it shortened the fever, lessened the lesions, and made
the disfigurement much less. Finsen was given the Nobel prize partly for
re-discovery of this. They segregated erysipelas and so prevented its
spread. They recognized the contagiousness of leprosy, and though it was
probably as widespread as tuberculosis is at the present time, they
succeeded not only in controlling but in eventually obliterating it
throughout Europe.

It was in surgery, however, that the greatest triumphs of teaching of
the medieval universities were secured. Most people are inclined to
think that surgery developed only in our day. The great surgeons of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, anticipated most of our
teaching. They investigated the causes of the failure of healing by
first intention, recognized the danger of wounds of the neck,
differentiated the venereal diseases, described rabies, and knew much of
blood poisoning, and operated very skilfully. We have their text-books
of surgery and they are a never-ending source of surprise. They operated
on the brain, on the thorax, on the abdominal cavity, and did not
hesitate to do most of the operations that modern surgeons do. They
operated for hernia by the radical cure, though Mondeville suggested
that more people were operated on for hernia for the benefit of the
doctor's pocket than for the benefit of the patient. Guy de Chauliac
declared that in wounds of the intestines patients would die unless the
intestinal lacerations were sewed up, and he described the method of
suture and invented a needle holder. We have many wonderful instruments
from these early days preserved in pictures at least, that show us how
much modern advance is merely re-invention.

They understood the principles of aseptic surgery very well. They
declared that