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
Like many another distinguished member of his profession, Chauliac did
not settle down in the scene of his ultimate labors at once, but was
something of a wanderer. His own words are, "_Et per multa tempora
operatus fui in multis partibus_." Perhaps out of gratitude to the
clerical patrons of his native town to whom he owed so much, or because
of the obligations he considered that he owed them for his education, he
practised first in his native diocese of Mende; thence he removed to
Lyons, where we know that he lived for several years, for in 1344 he
took part as a canon in a chapter that met in the Church of St. Just in
that city. Just when he was called to Avignon we do not know, though
when the black death ravaged that city in 1348 he was the body-physician
of Pope Clement VI, for he is spoken of in a Papal document as
"_venerabilis et circumspectus vir, dominus Guido de Cauliaco, canonicus
et praepositus ecclesiae Sancti Justi Lugduni, medicusque domini Nostri
Papae_." All the rest of his life was passed in the Papal capital, which
Avignon was for some seventy years of the fourteenth century. He served
as chamberlain-physician to three Popes, Clement VI, Innocent VI, and
Urban V. We do not know the exact date of his death, but when Pope Urban
V went to Rome in 1367, Chauliac was putting the finishing touches on
his "Chirurgia Magna," which, as he tells us, was undertaken as a
_solatium senectutis_--a solace in old age. When Urban returned to
Avignon for a time in 1370 Chauliac was dead. His life work is summed up
for us in this great treatise on surgery, full of anticipations in
surgical procedures that we are prone to think much more modern.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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