The climax of President White's treatment of the relationship of the Church to surgery and of the intense opposition manifested by ecclesiastics to surgical progress, and, I may add, the climax of absurdity as far as the real history of surgery is concerned, comes in the last paragraph of this portion of his chapter on From Miracles to Medicine, which President White has placed under the title Theological Opposition to Anatomical Studies. He says: "So deeply was the idea rooted in the mind of the Universal Church that for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable; the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany ordered that dishonor should no longer attach to the surgical profession." {170} President White insists over and over again that whatever surgery there was, and especially whatever progress was made in surgery, was due to the Arabs, or at least to Arabian initiative. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, [Footnote 21] which we have referred to elsewhere, is very far from sharing this view. I need scarcely say that Gurlt is one of our best authorities in the history of surgery. In his sketch of Roger, the first of the great Italian surgeons of the thirteenth century who came after the foundation of the universities, Gurlt says that, "though Arabian writings on surgery had been brought over to Italy by Constantine Africanus a hundred years before Roger's time, those exercised no influence over Italian surgery in the next century, and there is not a trace of the surgical knowledge of the Arabs to be found in Roger's work." His writing depends almost entirely upon the surgical traditions of his time, the experience of his teachers and colleagues, to whom in two places he has given due credit, and on the Greek writers. There are no traces of Arabisms to be found in Roger's writing, while they are full of Grecisms. Roger represents the first important writer on surgery in modern times, and his works have been printed several times because of their value as original documents. [Footnote 21: Geschichte der Chirurgie und ihrer Ausübung. Von Dr. E. Gurlt, Vol. I., p. 701.]