Old-Time Makers of Medicine: The Story of The Students And Teachers of the Sciences Related to Medicine During the Middle AgesWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Old-Time Makers of Medicine: The Story of The Students And Teachers of the Sciences Related to Medicine During the Middle Ages
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Medicine, Medieval; Physicians
Bertruccio's master, Mondino, is hailed in the history of medicine as
the father of dissection. His book on dissection was for the next three
centuries in the hands of nearly every medical scholar in Europe who was
trying to do good work in anatomy. It was not displaced until Vesalius
came, the father of modern anatomy, who revolutionized the science in
the Renaissance time. Mondino had devoted himself to the subject with
unfailing ardor and enthusiasm, and from everywhere in Europe the
students came to receive inspiration in his dissecting-room. Within a
few years such was the enthusiasm for dissection aroused by him in
Bologna that there were many legal prosecutions for body-snatching, the
consequence doubtless of a regulation of the Medical Department of the
University of Bologna, that if the students brought a body to any of
their teachers he was bound to dissect it for them. Bertruccio,
Mondino's disciple and successor, continued this great work, and now
Chauliac, the third in the tradition, was to carry the Bolognese methods
back to France, and his position as chamberlain to the Pope was to give
them a wide vogue throughout the world. The great French surgeon's
attitude toward anatomy and dissection can be judged from his famous
expression that "the surgeon ignorant of anatomy carves the human body
as a blind man carves wood." The whole subject of dissection at this
time has been fully discussed in the first three chapters of my "Popes
and Science," where those who are interested in the matter may follow it
to their satisfaction.[23]
After his Bologna experience Chauliac went to Paris. Evidently his
indefatigable desire to know all that there was to be known would not be
satisfied until he had spent some time at the great French university
where Lanfranc, after having studied under William of Salicet in Italy,
had gone to establish that tradition of French surgery which, carried on
so well by Mondeville his great successor, was to maintain Frenchmen as
the leading surgeons of the world until the nineteenth century (Pagel).
Lanfranc, himself an Italian, had been exiled from his native country,
apparently because of political troubles, but was welcomed at Paris
because the faculty realized that they needed the inspiration of the
Italian medical movement in surgery for the establishment of a good
school of surgery in connection with the university. The teaching so
well begun by Lanfranc was magnificently continued by Mondeville and
Arnold of Villanova and their disciples. Chauliac was fortunate enough
to come under the influence of Petrus de Argentaria, who was worthily
maintaining the tradition of practical teaching in anatomy and surgery
so well founded by his great predecessors of the thirteenth century.
After this grand tour Chauliac was himself prepared to do work of the
highest order, for he had been in touch with all that was best in the
medicine and surgery of his time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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