Old-Time Makers of Medicine | Page 7

was unfortunate in its influence was borrowed from them with the translations of the Greek authors from that language, which constituted the main, indeed often the only, reason why Arabian writers were consulted.
With the foundation of the medical school of Salerno in the tenth century, the modern history of medical education may be said to begin, for it had many of the features that distinguish our modern university medical schools. Its professors often came from a distance and had travelled extensively for purposes of study; they attracted patients of high rank from nearly every part of Europe, and these were generous in their patronage of the school. Students came from all over, from Africa and Asia, as well as Europe, and when abuses of medical practice began to creep in, a series of laws were made creating a standard of medical education and regulating the practice of medicine, that are interesting anticipations of modern movements of the same kind. Finally a law was passed requiring three years of preliminary work in logic and philosophy before medicine might be taken up, and then four years at medicine, with a subsequent year of practice with a physician before a license to practise for one's self was issued. In addition to this there was a still more surprising feature in the handing over of the department of women's diseases to women professors, and the consequent opening up of licensure to practise medicine to a great many women in the southern part of Italy. The surprise that all this should have taken place in the south of Italy is lessened by recalling the fact that the lower end of the Italian peninsula had been early colonized by Greeks, that its name in later times was Magna Gr?cia, and that the stimulus of Greek tradition has always been especially favorable to the development of scientific medicine.
Salerno's influence on Bologna is not difficult to trace, and the precious tradition of surgery particularly, which was carried to the northern university, served to initiate a period of surgery lasting nearly two centuries, during which we have some of the greatest contributions to this branch of medical science that were ever made. The development of the medical school at Bologna anticipated by but a short time that of a series of schools in the north Italian universities. Padua, Piacenza, Pisa, and Vicenza had medical schools in the later Middle Ages, the works of some of whose professors have attracted attention. It was from these north Italian medical schools that the tradition of close observation in medicine and of thoroughly scientific surgery found its way to Paris. Lanfranc was the carrier of surgery, and many French students who went to Italy came back with Italian methods. In the fourteenth century Guy de Chauliac made the grand tour in Italy, and then came back to write a text-book of surgery that is one of the monuments in this department of medical science. Before his time, Montpellier had attracted attention, but now it came to be looked upon as a recognized centre of great medical teaching. The absence of the Popes from Italy and the influence of their presence at Avignon made itself felt. While culture and education declined in Italy in the midst of political disturbances, they advanced materially at the south of France.
For our generation undoubtedly the most interesting chapter in the history of medieval medicine is that which tells of the marvellous development of surgery that took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Considerable space has been devoted to this, because it represents not only an important phase of the history of medicine, and recalls the names and careers of great makers of medicine, but also because it illustrates exquisitely the possibility of important discoveries in medicine being made, applied successfully for years, and then being lost or completely forgotten, though contained in important medical books that were always available for study. The more we know of this great period in the history of surgery, the more is the surprise at how much was accomplished, and how many details of our modern surgery were anticipated. Most of us have had some inkling of the fact that an?sthesia is not new, and that at various times in the world's history men have invented methods of producing states of sensibility in which more or less painless operations were possible. Very few of us have realized, however, the perfection to which an?sthesia was developed, and the possibility this provided for the great surgeons of the later medieval centuries to do operations in all the great cavities of the body, the skull, the thorax, and the abdomen, quite as they are done in our own time and apparently with no little degree of success.
Of course, any such extensive surgical intervention even for