would not be difficult to think of further such illustrations having been employed in the book itself. As we note in the chapter on "Great Surgeons of the Medieval Universities," Mondeville, according to Guy de Chauliac, had pictures of anatomical preparations which he used for teaching purposes. It is easy to understand that the value of such aids would be recognized at a time when the difficulty of preserving bodies made it necessary to do dissections hurriedly so as to get the rapidly decomposing material out of the way. Beyond his book and certain circumstances connected with it we know very little about Mondino. What we know, however, enables us to conclude that, like many another great teacher, he must have had the special faculty of inspiring his students with an ardent enthusiasm for the work that they were taking under him. Hence the body-snatching and other stories. Mondino continued to be held in high estimation by the Bolognese for centuries after his death. Dr. Pilcher calls attention to the fact that his sepulchral tablet, which is in the portico of the Church of San Vitari in Bologna, and a replica of which he was allowed to have made in order to bring it to America, is the only one of the sepulchral tablets in the great churches of Florence, San Domenico, San Martino, the Cathedral and the Cloister of San Giacomo degli Ermitani, which has not been removed from its original location and placed in the halls of the Civic Museum. Their removal he considers "a kind of desecration which does violence to one's sense of sanctity and propriety." "Fortunately, thus far, the Mondino Tablet has escaped the spoiler." Very probably Dr. Pilcher's replica of the tablet which he was required to deposit in the Civic Museum at the time when the copy was made to be brought to America may save the tablet to be seen in its original position for many generations. Mondino's career is of special interest because it foreshadows the life and accomplishment of many another maker of medicine of the after time. He did a great new thing in medicine in organizing regular public dissections, and then in making a manual that would facilitate the work. He waited patiently for years before completing his book in order that it might be the fruit of long experience, and so be more helpful to others. He was so modest as to require urging to secure the publication. He had the reward of his patience in the popularity of his little work for centuries after his time. The glimpse that we get of his relations to his young assistants, Agenius and Alessandra, seems to show us a teacher of distinct personal magnetism. Undoubtedly the reputation of his book did much for not only the medical school of the University of Bologna, but also for the medical schools of other north Italian universities, and helped to bring to them the crowds of students that flocked there during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taddeo and Mondino turned the attention of the medical students of their generations Bolognawards. Before that time they had mainly gone to Salerno. After their time most of the ardent students of medicine felt that they must study for a time at least at Bologna. Other important medical schools of Italian universities at Padua, at Vicenza, at Piacenza, arose and prospered. During the time when the political troubles of Italy reached a climax about the middle of the fourteenth century, while the Popes were at Avignon, there was a remission in the attendance at all the Italian universities, but with the Popes' return to Rome and the coming of even comparative peace to Italy, Bologna once more became the term of medical pilgrimages for students from all over the world. In the meantime Mondino's book went forth to be the most used text-book of its kind until Vesalius' great work came to replace it. To have ruled in the world of anatomy for two centuries as the best known of teachers is of itself a distinction that shows us at once the teaching power and the scientific ability of this professor of anatomy of Bologna in the early fourteenth century. X GREAT SURGEONS OF THE MEDIEVAL Strange as it may appear to those who have not watched the development of our knowledge of the Middle Ages in recent years the most interesting feature in the medical departments and, indeed, of the post-graduate work generally of the medieval universities, is that in surgery. There is a very general impression that this department of medicine did not develop until quite recent years, and that particularly it failed to develop to any extent in the Middle Ages. A good many of the historians of this period, indeed, though never the special historians of medicine, have even gone far afield in order to find some reason why surgery did not develop at this time. They have insisted that the Church by its prohibition of the shedding of blood, first to monks and friars, and then to the secular clergy, prevented the normal development of surgery. Besides they add that Church opposition to anatomy completely precluded all possibility of any genuine natural evolution of surgery as a science. There is probably no more amusing feature of quite a number of supposedly respectable and presumably authoritative historical works written in English than this assumption with regard to the absence of surgery during the later Middle Ages. Only the most complete ignorance of the actual history of medicine and surgery can account for it. The writers who make such assertions must never have opened an authoritative medical history. Nothing illustrates so well the expression of the editors of the " Cambridge Modern History" referred to more than once in these pages that "in view of changes and of gains such as these [the printing of original documents] it has become impossible for historical writers of the present day to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authority. The honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of historical literature." Fortunately for us this sweeping condemnation does not vid to any great extent for the medical historical classics. All of the classic historians of medicine tell us much of the surgery of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in recent years the republication of old texts and the further study of manuscript documents of various kinds have made it very clear that there is almost no period in the history of the world when surgery was so thoroughly and successfully cultivated as during the rise and development of the universities and their medical schools in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is interesting to trace the succession of great contributors to surgery during these two centuries. We know their teaching not from tradition, but from their text-books so faithfully preserved for us by their devoted students, who must have begrudged no time and spared no labor in copying, for many of the books are large, yet exist in many manuscript copies. |