Pagel has three closely printed pages in small type of titles alone of subjects which Chauliac treated with {185} distinction. His description of instruments and methods of operation is especially full and suggestive. He knew how to prescribe manipulations and set forth the principles on which they were founded. Scarcely anything was added to his method of taxis for hernia for five centuries after his time. He describes the passage of a catheter with the accuracy and complete technic of a man who knew all the difficulties of it in complicated conditions. He recognizes the dangers that arise for the surgeon from the presence of anatomical anomalies of various kinds, and describes certain of the more important of them. He did not hesitate to suggest some very serious operations. For instance, for empyema he advises opening of the chest. He has very exact indications for trephining. He recognizes the absolute fatality of wounds of the abdomen, in which the intestines were opened, if they were left untreated, and describes a method of suturing wounds of the intestines in order to save the patient's life. In a word, there is nothing that has been attempted in these modern times, with our aseptic precautions and the advantage of anaesthesia, which this father of surgery did not discuss very practically and with excellent common sense as well as surgical acumen. Chauliac's career is interesting because it is that of a self-made man of the Middle Ages, which brings out the fact that men do not differ so much as might be thought at this distance of time, and shows that there were chances for a man to rise by his own genius from a lowly to a lofty position at this time of the Middle Ages, when it is usually supposed that men were excluded from such opportunities. Allbutt says of him: "Still, Guy of Chauliac, who flourished in the second {186} half of the fourteenth century, was enabled to feed his virile and inquisitive spirit on rich sources of learning. While he succeeded to the stores of Arnold (of Villanova) and Gordon with his just and cautious reason and wealth of experience, he cast out of them much of the sorcery, jugglery, astrology and mysticism which were their reproach. Chauliac is a village in the Auvergne, and Guy was but a farmer's lad. It was by the aid of powerful friends that he studied at Toulouse and Montpelier, took orders and the degree of Master of Medicine; in his time there was no degree of Doctor of Medicine in France. Then he studied anatomy at Bologna under Bertruccio, the successor of Mondino, a study which, with Henry (de Mondeville) he regarded as the foundation of surgery. The surgeon ignorant of anatomy, he says, "carves the human body as a blind man carves wood." [Footnote 24]