Lanfranc, or Lanfranchi (according to whether one prefers his French or Italian name), studied under William of Salicet. Of his early life very little is known, save that he practiced surgery in Milan at the time of the great dissension between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and, for attaching himself to the weaker party, was exiled and forced to seek an asylum in France; he resided in Lyons for several years, and here wrote a work on minor surgery; in 1295 he went to Paris on the invitation of the faculty of medicine, opened a course on surgery which met with great success, and then published a second and larger treatise on the subject. It is said of him by Malgaigne that, less from his fault perhaps than that of his age, after his death (about 1315) surgery began to decline. From the time of Brunus, who practiced in Padua in 1250, the barbers had done the scarifying and bleeding. After the time of Lanfranchi there were others who applied leeches and often cauteries, and even the women meddled with surgery and in all operations competed with the barbers; the lay surgeons held themselves rivals to the clergy. Lanfranchi inherited from his old master, William, an aversion for them all, and often had to contend with uneducated and incompetent laymen. Clerical surgeons regarded operations as beneath their dignity; and Lanfranchi, who deplored this condition of affairs, confessed he had sometimes bled with his own hands, but had never operated for ascites, hernia, cataract, or stone. John{092} Pitard has descended to fame not as a writer, but as the founder of the surgical schools of St. Come and St. Damien, which occupy so eminent a position in the surgical annals of France. In 1306 he was surgeon to the King of France, Philip le Bel, and the sworn surgeon of Chatelet. The College of St. Come, in 1311, was only a little brotherhood of lay-surgeons, who gradually grew in importance as the result of the obstinate struggles sustained,--on the one hand, against the faculty of medicine, and, on the other, against the barber-surgeons. Malgaigne has, with great patience and clearness, shown that the importance of this body of men has been greatly exaggerated by historians; he has traced their various turns of fortune from beginning to end; I shall have occasion to consider them again farther on.