The other great surgeon and surgical writer of the time, for there must have been many distinguished surgeons and only a few writers, if we can trust to common experience in that matter, was John Ardern, an English surgeon. He was educated in Montpellier, practised for a time in France, then settled for some years in the {140} small town of Newark in Nottinghamshire, and then for nearly thirty years in London. His "Practice of Surgery," as yet existing only in manuscript, is another one of these wonderful contributions to the applied sciences of anatomy and medicine at a time when such applications are often supposed to have been absent. He was an expert operator and had a wide reputation for his success in the treatment of diseases of the rectum. He was the inventor of a new clyster apparatus. Daremberg, the medical historian, who saw a copy of Ardern's manuscript in St. John's College, Oxford, says that it contained numerous illustrations of instruments and operations. We fortunately possess an excellent manuscript copy in the Surgeon General's Library at Washington, and sometime it is hoped this will be edited and published. The most interesting feature of the work of all of these men is their dependence on personal observation and not on authority. Guy de Chauliac's position in this matter can be very well appreciated from his criticism of John of Gaddesden's book in which he bewails the blind following of those who had gone before. His bitterest reproach for many of his predecessors was that, "They followed one another like cranes, whether for fear or love he would not say." Pagel praises Ypermann for the well-marked striving which he has noted in him to free himself from the bondage of authority, and because most of his therapeutic {141} descriptions rest upon his own experience. William of Salicet, at the beginning of this great period of surgery, had insisted that notes of cases were the most valuable sources of wisdom in medicine and surgery. The last of them, Ardern, gave statistics of his cases and was quite as proud as any modern surgeon of the large number that he had operated on. He gives these carefully and accurately.