Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
luminous writing." Pagel says, "Chauliac represents the summit of
attainment in mediaeval {137} surgery, and he laid the foundation of
that primacy in surgery which the French maintained down to the
nineteenth century." Professor Clifford Allbutt 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 with
Hippocrates or that John Freind calls him the prince of surgeons. The
book is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise." In a word it has all
the qualities that are usually said to be lacking in the work of
mediaeval scientists, and it is a standing reproach to those who
ignorantly have made so little of the work of these wonderful men of
the olden time, who anticipated so many of the features of our modern
medicine and surgery that we are prone to think of as representing
climaxes in human progress, indications of a wonderful human
evolution.
Two other names of great professors of surgery deserve to be mentioned
because they make it very clear that this wonderful development of
surgery was not confined to France and Italy, but made itself felt all
over Europe. One of these is John Ypermann, a surgeon of the early
fourteenth century, of whom almost nothing was known until about
twenty-five years ago, when the Belgian historian, Broeck, brought to
light his works and gathered some details of his life. He was a pupil
of Lanfranc, and at the end of the thirteenth century studied at Paris
on a scholarship voted by his native town of Ypres, {138} which
provided maintenance and tuition fees for him at the great French
university expressly in order that he might become expert in surgery.
We are likely to think of Ypres as an unimportant town, but it was one
of the great industrial centres of Europe and one of the most
populous, busy towns of Flanders in the Middle Ages, noted for its
manufacture of linens and fine laces. The famous Cloth Hall, erected
in the thirteenth century, one of the most beautiful architectural
monuments in Europe, and one of the finest buildings of its kind in
the world, was the result of the same spirit that sent Ypermann to
Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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