Curiosities of Medical ExperienceMillingen, J. G. (John Gideon)
Philosophy
Curiosities of Medical Experience
Millingen, J. G. (John Gideon)
Medicine
In 1355 these master-surgeons constituted a faculty, which pocketed
one-half of the penalties imposed upon the unlucky wights who had not the
honour of belonging to their body. They also enjoyed various immunities
and exemptions; amongst others, that of not keeping guard and watch in the
city of Paris. To increase their emoluments, they granted as many honorary
distinctions as they could in decency devise, and introduced the
categories of bachelors, licentiates, masters, graduates, and
non-graduates of surgery. The medical faculty now began to complain of the
encroachments of the master-surgeons on their internal domain of poor
mortality with as much bitterness as the masters complained of the
impertinent invasion on the part of the barbers, of their external
dominion. To court the powerful protection of the university against these
interlopers, the surgeons consented to be considered as the scholars of
the medical faculty, chiefly governed by clerical physicians.
In 1452 a fresh source of dissension arose amongst clerical physicians,
lay physicians, master surgeons, and barbers. Cardinal Etoutville
abolished the law which bound the physicians of the university to
celibacy, when, to use the historian's words, "many of the clerical
physicians, thinking there was more comfort to be found in a wife without
a benefice than could be expected in a benefice without a wife, abandoned
the priesthood, and were then permitted to visit their patients at their
own houses." Thus thrown into the uncontrolled practice of medicine, these
physicians became jealous of the influence of the surgeons, to whom they
had been so much indebted; and they had recourse to every art and
manoeuvre that priestcraft could devise to oppress and degrade them. To
aid this purpose, they resorted to the barbers, whom they instructed in
private, to enable them to oppose the master-surgeons more effectually.
The surgeons, indignant at this protection, had recourse to the medical
faculty, supplicating them to have the barbers shorn of their rising
dignity. Thus for mere motives of pecuniary interest, and the evident
detriment of society, did these intriguing practitioners struggle for
power and consequent fees; and, according to the vacillation of their
interests, the barbers became alternately the allies of the physicians or
the mercenary skirmishers of the surgeons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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