this time and was making some excellent demonstrations in anatomy, employing human dissections very freely. Chauliac tells of the methods that Bertruccio used in order that bodies might be in as good condition as possible for demonstration purposes, and mentions the fact that he saw him do many dissections in different ways.

In Roth's life of Vesalius, which is usually considered one of our most authoritative medical historical works not only with regard to the details of Vesalius' life, but also in all that concerns anatomy about that time and for some centuries before, there is a passage quoted from Chauliac himself which shows how freely dissection was practised at the Italian universities in the fourteenth century. This passage deserves to be quoted at some length because there are even serious historians who still cite a Bull of Pope Boniface VIII, issued in 1300, forbidding the boiling and dismembering of bodies in order to transport them to long distances for burial in their own country, as being, either rightly or wrongly, interpreted as a prohibition of dissection and, therefore, preventing the development of anatomy. In the notes to his history of dissection during this period in Bologna Roth says: " Without doubt the passage in Guy de Chauliac which tells of having frequently seen dissections, must be considered as referring to Bologna. This passage runs as follows: My master Bertruccius conducted the dissection very often after the following manner: the dead body having been placed upon a bench, he used to make four lessons on it. In the first the nutritional portions were treated, because they are

so likely to become putrofied. In the second, bo demonstrated the spiritual members; in the third, the animate members; in the fourth, the extrem ities.'" (Roth," Andreas Vesalius." Basel, 1996)

Bertruccio's master, Mondino, is hailed in the hig tory of medicine as the father of dissection. His book on dissection was for the next three centuries in the hands of nearly every medical scholar in Europe who was trying to do good work in anatomy. It was not displaced until Vesalius came, the father of modern anatomy, who revolutionized the science in the Renaissance time. Mondino had devoted him self to the subject with unfailing ardor and enthusi asm, and from everywhere in Europe the sindents came to receive inspiration in his dissecting room. Within a few years such was the enthusiasm for dis section aroused by him in Bologna that there were many legal prosecutions for body snatching, the con sequence doubtless of a regulation of the Medienl Department of the University of Bologna, that if the students brought a body to any of their teachers he was bound to dissect it for them. Bertruccio, Mondino's disciple and successor, continued this great work, and now Chauliae, the third in the tradi tion, was to carry the Bolognese methods back to France, and his position as chamberlain to the Pope was to give them a wide vogne throughout the world. The great French surgeon's attitude toward t omy and dissection can be judged from his famous expression that "the surgeon ignorant of unsheng carves the human body # # bind

of my

Popes and Science," where those who are interested in the matter may follow it to their satisfaction.1

After his Bologna experience Chauliac went to Paris. Evidently his indefatigable desire to know all that there was to be known would not be satisfied until he had spent some time at the great French university where Lanfranc, after having studied under William of Salicet in Italy, had gone to establish that tradition of French surgery which, carried on so well by Mondeville his great successor, was to maintain Frenchmen as the leading surgeons of the world until the nineteenth century (Pagel). Lanfranc, himself an Italian, had been exiled from his native country, apparently because of political troubles, but was welcomed at Paris because the faculty realized that they needed the inspiration of the Italian medical movement in surgery for the establishment of a good school of surgery in connection with the university. The teaching so well begun by Lanfranc was magnificently continued by Mondeville and Arnold of Villanova and their disciples. Chauliac was fortunate enough to come under the influence of Petrus de Argentaria, who was worthily maintaining the tradition of practical teaching in anatomy and surgery so well founded by his great predecessors of the thirteenth century. After this grand tour Chauliac was himself prepared to do work of the highest order, for he had been in touch with all that was best in the medicine and surgery of his time.

1 Fordham University Press, New York, 1908.

Like many another distinguished member of his profession, Chauliac did not settle down in the scene of his ultimate labors at once, but was something of a wanderer. His own words are, "Et per multa tempora operatus fui in multis partibus." Perhaps out of gratitude to the clerical patrons of his native town to whom he owed so much, or because of the obligations he considered that he owed them for his education, he practised first in his native diocese of Mende; thence he removed to Lyons, where we know that he lived for several years, for in 1344 he took part as a canon in a chapter that met in the Church of St. Just in that city. Just when he was called to Avignon we do not know, though when the black death ravaged that city in 1348 he was the bodyphysician of Pope Clement VI, for he is spoken of in a Papal document as "venerabilis et circumspectus vir, dominus Guido de Cauliaco, canonicus et præpositus ecclesia Sancti Justi Lugduni, medicusque domini Nostri Papæ." All the rest of his life was passed in the Papal capital, which Avignon was for some seventy years of the fourteenth century. He served as chamberlain-physician to three Popes, Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V. We do not know the exact date of his death, but when Pope Urban V went to Rome in 1367, Chauliac was putting the finishing touches on his "Chirurgia Magna," which, as he tells us, was undertaken as a solatium senectutis-a solace in old age. When Urban returned to Avignon for a time in 1370 Chauliac was dead. His life work is summed up for us in this great treatise on surgery, full of anticipa

tions in surgical procedures that we are prone to think much more modern.

Nicaise has emphasized the principles which guided Guy de Chauliac in the choice and interpretation of his authorities by a quotation from Guy himself, which is so different in its tone from what is usually supposed to have been the attitude of mind of the men of science of the time that it would be well for all those who want to understand the Middle Ages better to have it near them. Speaking of the surgeons of his own and immediately preceding generations, Guy says: "One thing particularly is a source of annoyance to me in what these surgeons have written, and it is that they follow one another like so many cranes. For one always says what the other says. I do not know whether it is from fear or from love that they do not deign to listen except to such things as they are accustomed to and as have been proved by authorities. They have to my mind understood very badly Aristotle's second book of metaphysics where he shows that these two things, fear and love, are the greatest obstacles on the road to the knowledge of the truth. Let them give up such friendships and fears. Because while Socrates or Plato may be a friend, truth is a greater friend.' Truth is a holy thing and worthy to be honored above everything else. Let them follow the doctrine of Galen, which is entirely made up of experience and reason, and in which one investigates things and despises words."

After all, this is what great authorities in medicine have always insisted on. Once every hundred years or so one finds a really great observer who