After Lanfranc at Paris came Henri de Mondeville, whom Latin writers
usually quote as _Henricus_. At least a dozen variants of the second
portion of his name are found in literature, from Armondeville to
Hermondaville. He was another of the University men of this time who
wandered far for opportunities in education. Though born in the North of
France and receiving his preliminary education there, he made his medical
studies in the latter half of the thirteenth century under Theodoric in
Italy. Afterwards he studied medicine in Montpellier and surgery in Paris.
Later he gave at least one course of lectures at Montpellier, and then a
series of lectures in Paris, attracting to both universities during his
professorship a crowd of students from every part of Europe. One of his
teachers at Paris had been his compatriot, Jean Pitard, the surgeon of
Philippe le Bel, of whom he speaks as "most skilful and expert in the
practice of surgery," and it was doubtless to Pitard's friendship that he
owed his appointment as one of the four surgeons and three physicians who
accompanied the King into Flanders.
There is an historical tradition which has led many to believe that the
surgery of the fourteenth century was mainly in the hands of the barber
surgeons--ignorant men who plied a rude handicraft in connection with some
conventional use of the lancet--and that the physicians quite despised
their surgical colleagues. Mondeville is a striking contradiction of this.
He was a scholarly man, who quotes not only all the distinguished
contributors to medicine and surgery before his time, the Greeks and
Latins, the Arabs, and his Italian masters, but who also has quotations
from poets and philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, Diogenes, Cato, Horace,
Ovid, Seneca, and others.
The Regius Professors of Medicine at both Oxford and Cambridge in our
generation are on record with the declaration that medicine and surgery
have been allowed to drift too far apart, and that above all the physician
should see more of surgical operations for the confirmation of diagnoses,
for they are real bioscopys. It is rather interesting to find, then, that
Mondeville felt the necessity in his time for close relations between
physicians and surgeons, and said:
"It is impossible that a surgeon should be expert who does not know not
only the principles, but everything worth while knowing about medicine,"
and then he added, "just as it is impossible for a man to be a good
physician who is entirely ignorant of the art of surgery." He says
further: "This our art of surgery, which is the third part of medicine
[the other two parts were diet and drugs] is, with all due deference to
physicians, considered by us surgeons ourselves and by the non-medical as
a more certain, nobler, securer, more perfect, more necessary, and more
lucrative art than the other parts of medicine." Surgeons have always been
prone to glory in their speciality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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