Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
His pupil Lanfranc equalled his master in devotion to practical
surgery and surpassed him in his development of the great science of
medicine. Pagel, the well-known German historian of medicine, says
that, in his text-book Lanfranc has excellent chapters on the
affections of the eyes, the ears and mouth, the nose, even the teeth,
and treats of hernia in a very practical common-sense way. He warns
against the radical operation and says, in words that come home to us
with strange familiarity at the present time, that many surgeons
decide on operations too easily, not for the sake of the patient but
for the sake of the money that is in them. Lanfranc's discussion of
cystotomy, Pagel characterizes as prudent but rational, for he
considers that the operations should not be feared too much but not
delayed too long. In patients suffering from the inconvenience which
comes from large quantities of fluid in the abdomen he advises
_paracentesis abdominis_, but warns against putting the patient in
danger from such an operation without due consideration. Pagel says
that Lanfranc must be considered as one of the greatest surgeons of
the Middle Ages and the real establisher of the prestige of the French
school of surgery which maintained its prominence down to the
nineteenth century.
Lanfranc had been invited to Paris to take the chair of surgery,
because the authorities of the university wanted to add prestige to
the medical school, which was not as well known as the school {134} of
philosophy. The fame of William of Salicet had spread throughout
academic Europe, and so Lanfranc was offered the chair at the
University of Paris in order to carry his master's message there. The
next in the succession of great teachers at Paris was Mondeville, who
found less to do in an original way than his master Lanfranc and his
protomaster William, but who accomplished much for surgery. All that
he did was thrown into the shade by what was accomplished for
succeeding generations by the next in the series, Guy de Chauliac, who
studied for a time in Paris under Mondeville, though his early medical
education was obtained at Montpellier, but had also had the advantage
of spending a year in Italy at the various medical schools which were
famous at that time. These two incidents, Lanfranc's invitation to
Paris to be a teacher there from Italy more than a thousand miles
away, and Guy de Chauliac's studies in all the important universities
of Europe of the time before he took up his own work, illustrate
better than any words of ours can the ardent enthusiasm for study, the
thoroughgoing anticipation of our most modern methods in education.
Mondeville, like Chauliac, had made very nearly the same round of the
universities. It is a custom, not a chance incident, that we have to
deal with here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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