While, as Gurlt remarks in his "History of Surgery," Arculanus' name is one of those scarcely known--he is usually considered just one of many obscure writers of the end of the Middle Ages--his writings deserve a better fate. They contain much that is interesting and a great deal that must have been of the highest practical value to his contemporaries. They attracted wide attention in his own and immediately succeeding generations. The proof of this is that they exist in a large number of manuscript copies. Just as soon as printing was introduced his books appeared in edition after edition. His "Practica" was printed in no less than seven editions in Venice. Three of them appeared before the end of the fifteenth century, which places them among the _incunabula_ of printing. Probably nothing in the history of human intellectual interest is more striking than the excellent judgment displayed by the editors who selected the works to be printed at this time. Very few of them were trivial or insignificant. Fewer still were idle speculations, and most of them were almost of classical import for literature and science. Four editions of this work were printed in Venice in the sixteenth century, one of them as late as 1560, when the work done by such men as Vesalius, Columbus, Eustachius, and Fallopius would seem to have made Arculanus out of date. The dates of the various editions are Venice, 1483, 1493, 1497, 1504, 1542, 1557, and 1560. Besides there was an edition printed at Basel in 1540. Arculanus is said to have re-introduced the use of the seton, that is the method of producing intense counter-irritation by the introduction of some foreign body into an incision in the skin. We owe to him, too, according to Pagel in the chapters on medieval medicine in Puschmann's "Handbook of the History of Medicine," an excellent description of alcoholic insanity.