he was for three centuries the classic par excellence. He rendered the study easy and profitable, and all the foreign nations the tributaries of our country." Peyrihle considered Guy's "Surgery" as the most valuable and complete work of all those of the same kind that had been published since Hippocrates and added that the reading of it was still useful in his time in 1784. Bégin, in his work on Ambroise Paré, says "that Guy has written an immortal book to which are attached the destinies of French surgeons." Malgaigne, in his "History of Surgery," does not hesitate to say, "I do not fear to say that, Hippocrates alone excepted, there is not a single treatise on surgery, Greek, Latin, or Arabic,-which I place above, or even on the same level with, this magnificent work, The Surgery of Guy de Chauliac.'" Daremberg said, "Guy seems to us a surgeon above all erudite, yet expert and without ever being rash. He knows, above all, how to choose what is best in everything." Verneuil, in his " Conférence sur Les Chirurgiens Érudits," says, "The services rendered by the Great Surgery' were immense; by it there commenced for France an era of splendor. It is with justice, then, that posterity has decreed to Guy de Chauliac the title of Father of French surgery."

6

The more one reads of Chauliac's work the less is one surprised at the estimation in which he has been held wherever known. It would not be hard to add a further sheaf of compliments to those collected by Nicaise. Modern writers on the history of medicine have all been enthusiastic in their admiration of him, just in proportion to the thorough

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ness of their acquaintance with him. Portal, in his "History of Anatomy and Surgery," says, Finally, it may be averred that Guy de Chauliac said nearly everything which modern surgeons say, and that his work is of infinite price but unfortunately too little read, too little pondered." Malgaigne declares Chauliac's "Chirurgia Magna" to be a masterpiece of learned and luminous writing." Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, says of Chauliac's treatise: "This great work I have studied carefully and not without prejudice; yet I cannot wonder that Fallopius compared the author to Hippocrates or that John Freind calls him the Prince of Surgeons. It is rich, aphoristic, orderly, and precise.

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If to this account of his professional career it be added that Chauliac's personality is, if possible, more interesting than his surgical accomplishment, some idea of the significance of the life of the great father of modern surgery will be realized. We have already quoted the distinguished words of praise accorded him by Pope Clement VI. That they were well deserved, Chauliac's conduct during the black death which ravaged Avignon in 1348, shortly after his arrival in the Papal City, would have been sufficient of itself to attest. The occurrence of the plague in a city usually gave rise to an exhibition of the most arrant cowardice, and all who could, fled. In many of the European cities the physicians joined the fugitives, and the ailing were left to care

"The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery," by T. Clifford Allbutt, M.A., M.D. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1905.

for themselves. With a few notable exceptions, this was the case at Avignon, but Guy was among those who remained faithful to his duty and took on himself the self-sacrificing labor of caring for the sick, doubly harassing because so many of his brother physicians were absent. He denounces their conduct as shameful, yet does not boast of his own courage, but on the contrary says that he was in constant fear of the disease. Toward the end of the epidemic he was attacked by the plague and for a time his life was despaired of. Fortunately he recovered, to become the most influential among his colleagues, the most highly admired of the physicians of his generation, and the close personal friend of all the high ecclesiastics, who had witnessed his magnificent display of courage and of helpfulness for the plague-stricken during the epidemic. He wrote a very clear account of the epidemic, which leaves no doubt that it was true bubonic plague.

After this fine example, Chauliac's advice to brother physicians in the specialty of surgery carried added weight. In the Introductory chapter of his "Chirurgia Magna " he said:

"The surgeon should be learned, skilled, ingenious, and of good morals. Be bold in things that are sure, cautious in dangers; avoid evil cures and practices; be gracious to the sick, obliging to his colleagues, wise in his predictions. Be chaste, sober, pitiful, and merciful; not covetous nor extortionate of money; but let the recompense be moderate, according to the work, the means of the sick, the character of the issue or event, and its dignity."

"Never

No wonder that Malgaigne says of him, since Hippocrates has medicine heard such language filled with so much nobility and so full of matter in so few words."

Chauliac was in every way worthy of his great contemporaries and the period in which his lot was cast. Ordinarily we are not apt to think of the early fourteenth century as an especially productive period in human history, but such it is. Dante's Divine Comedy was entirely written during Chauliac's life. Petrarch was born within a few years of Chauliac himself; Boccaccio in Italy, and Chaucer in England, wrote while Chauliac was still alive. Giotto did his great painting, and his pupils were laying the deep, firm foundations of modern art. Many of the great cathedrals were being finished. Most of the universities were in the first flush of their success as moulders of the human mind. There are few centuries in history that can show the existence of so many men whose work was to have an enduring influence for all the after time as this upon which Chauliac's career shed so bright a light. The preceding century had seen the origin of the universities and the rise of such supremely great men as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and the other famous scholars of the early days of the mendicant orders, and had made the intellectual mould of university training in which men's minds for seven centuries were to be formed, so that Chauliac, instead of being an unusual phenomenon is only a fitting expression of the interest of this time in everything, including the physical sciences and, above all, medicine and surgery.

For some people it may be a source of surprise that Chauliac should have had the intellectual training to enable him to accomplish such judicious work in his specialty. Many people will be apt to assume that he accomplished what he did in spite of his training, genius succeeding even in an unfavorable environment, and notwithstanding educational disadvantages. Those who would be satisfied with any such explanation, however, know nothing of the educational opportunities provided in the period of which Chauliac was the fruit. He is a typical university man of the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the universities must be given due credit for him. It is ordinarily assumed that the universities paid very little attention to science and that scientists would find practically nothing to satisfy in their curricula. Professor Huxley in his address on "Universities, Actual and Ideal," delivered as the Rectorial Address at Aberdeen University in 1874, declared that they were probably educating in the real sense of the word better than we do now. (See quotation in "The Medical School at Salerno.")

In the light of Chauliac's life it is indeed amusing to read the excursions of certain historians into the relationship of the Popes and the Church to science during the Middle Ages. Chauliac is typically representative of medieval science, a man who gave due weight to authority, yet tried everything by his own experience, and who sums up in himself such wonderful advance in surgery that during the last twenty years the students of the history of medicine