tly orthodox
physician, possessed of exceptional education in the science of his
day, a man of wide reading, broadened by extensive travel and endowed
with the knowledge acquired by a long experience, honest, truthful and
simple minded, yet not uncritical in regard to novelties, firm in his
own opinions but not arrogant, sympathetic, possessed of a high sense
of professional honor, a firm believer in authority and therefore
credulous, superstitious after the manner of his age, yet harboring,
too, a germ of that healthy skepticism which Roger Bacon, his great
contemporary, developed and illustrated.

I believe, therefore, that we may justly award to the medical pages of
the Compendium not only the rather negative praise of being written
as well as the work of any of Gilbert's contemporaries, but the more
positive credit of being thoroughly abreast of the medical science of
its age and country, an "Abstract and brief chronicle of the time."

The surgical chapters of the work are unique in a compendium of
medicine, and merit even more favorable criticism.

The discouragement of the practice of medicine and surgery on the
part of ecclesiastics by the popes and church councils of the twelfth
century, culminating in the decree of Pope Innocent III in 1215,
which forbade the participation of the higher clergy in any operation
involving the shedding of blood (_Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine_); the
relatively scanty supply of educated lay physicians and surgeons, and
finally the pride and inertia of the lay physicians themselves; all
these combined to relegate surgery in the thirteenth century to the
hands of a class of ignorant and unconscionable empirics, whose rash
activity shed a baleful light upon the art of surgery itself. As a
natural result the practice of this art drifted into an _impasse_,
from which the organization of the barber-surgeons seemed the only
logical means of escape.

The earliest evidence of the public surgical activity of the barbers,
as a class, is found, I believe, in Joinville's Chronicle of the
Crusade of St. Louis (Louis IX) in the year 1250. According to
Malgaigne, no trustworthy evidence of any organization of the
barbers of Paris is available before 1301, and the fraternity was not
chartered until 1427, under Charles VII. The barbers of London are
noticed in 1308, and they received their charter from Edward IV in
1462. The parallel lines upon which the confraternities of the two
cities develop