[Footnote 23: Quite as curious notions as these which President White mentions still exist in popular medicine in our own day. I have myself known a man to blow the dried excrement of the dog into the throat of his child suffering from diphtheria, and _he assured me that it cured him_. In the country districts they still use ordure poultices for sprains of various kinds, and I have known doctors prescribe them. I have seen an intelligent woman smoking dried angleworms in a pipe for toothache. I sincerely hope, however, that no serious(!) historian of the twenty-fifth century will gather up side remarks like the present with regard to such curious customs--real superstitions that have nothing to do with religion, as most supersititions have not--and state them as showing the ignorance of our generation, and above all as indicating the low state of medicine in our time.] {184} Lest it should be thought that possibly Professor Allbutt had been rather partial to the great Father of Modern Surgery in his enthusiasm for these medieval surgeons, it seems worth while to compress here something of what Pagel has to say with regard to this great man, who represents in himself a full hundred years of progress in surgery. He wrote an immense text-book of surgery, from which his teaching may be learned with absolute authenticity. The great significance attached to Guy's writings by his contemporaries and successors will be readily appreciated from the immense number of manuscript copies, original editions in print, and the many translations which are extant. This monument of scientific surgery has for dedication a sentence that would alone and of itself obliterate all the nonsense that has been talked about Papal opposition to the development of surgery. It runs as follows:-- (I dedicate this work) "To you my masters, physicians of Montpelier, Bologna, Paris, and Avignon, especially you of the Papal Court with whom I have been associated in the service of the Roman Pontiffs. The exact words as given by Pagel are "Vobis dominis meis medicis Montispessulani, Bononiae, Parisiis atque Avinionis, praecipue papalibus, quibus me in servitio Romanorum pontificum associavi."