If we add that, at this same time the proper use of opium in medicine was a feature of medical teaching which had just been introduced by a Papal physician, while a form of anaesthesia was being practically developed and very generally employed, the question will be why we, in the twentieth century, do not know ever so much more than we actually do, rather than why these earnest students of the thirteenth century knew so little, which is the absurd thought that most authorities in education seem to entertain at the present time with regard to our forbears of early university history. The student of medicine during the thirteenth century had to devote himself very nearly to the same department of science as those which occupy his colleagues of the present century. The prospectus of a medical school of the time would announce very probably some such program of studies as this. Besides learning something of astrology (the astronomy of the day) the student would be expected to know much about climate and its influence on disease, and about soil in its relation to pathology (these were supposed to be fruitful causes of disease). Certain minerals, among them very probably antimony, were beginning to be used in medical practice, and so mineralogy was a special subject of study. Of plants they were expected to know in a general way much more than the modern {158} medical student, to whom botany is not considered of much importance, and of zoology they probably had at least as great practical knowledge, since many of their dissections were made on animals, and the differences in structure between them and man were pointed out when the annual anatomies or human dissections at the universities were made. Of pharmacology and the allied subject, chemistry, they had to know all that would enable them to use properly the several hundred vegetable remedies then used in medicine. This will give an idea, then, what were in general the studies which Pope John was trying to foster with so much care in the University of Perugia.