It has been said by an American writer, who has published several treatises well-calculated to give the workman an elevated idea of his rights and duties, that the "man who will go into a cotton-mill,--who will observe the parts of the machinery, and the various processes of the fabric, till he reaches the hydraulic press, with which it is made into a bale, and the canal or railroad by which it is sent to market, may find every branch of trade, and every department of science, literally crossed, intertwined, interwoven with every other, like the woof and the warp of the article manufactured."[27] This crossing and intertwining of the abstract and practical sciences, the mechanic skill and the manual labour, which are so striking in the manufacture of a piece of calico, prevail throughout every department of industry in a highly-civilized community. Every one who labours at all profitably labours for the production of utility, and sets in motion the labour of others. Look at the labour of the medical profession. In the fourteenth century, John de Gaddesden treated a son of Edward II. for the small-pox by wrapping him up in scarlet cloth, and hanging scarlet curtains round his bed; and, as a remedy for epilepsy, the same physician carried his patients to church to hear mass. The medical art was so little understood in those days, that the professors of medicine had made no impression upon the understanding of the people; and they consequently trusted not to medicine, but to vain charms, which superstitions the ignorance of the practitioners themselves kept alive. The surgical practitioners of Europe, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, put their unhappy patients to the most dreadful torture by their mode of treating wounds and broken limbs. When they amputated a leg or an arm they applied the actual cautery, or red-hot iron, to stop the effusion of blood. Ambrose Paré, one of the most eminent of the French surgeons of that period, who accompanied the army to the siege of Turin, in 1536, thus describes the mode in which he found his surgical brethren dealing with gun-shot wounds: [Illustration: Ambrose Paré.]