Daremberg, the medical historian, who saw a copy of Ardern's manuscript in St. John's College, Oxford, says that it contains numerous illustrations of instruments and operations. His work seems really to be a series of monographs or collection of special articles on different subjects, which Ardern had made at various times, rather than a connected work. Pagel bewails the fact {189} that a more thorough consideration of Ardern's work is impossible, because the greater part of what he wrote remains as yet unprinted. In general, when we consider how difficult was the task of making copies of works on surgery by hand, and especially such as contain numerous illustrations, the wonder grows that we should have so much about the surgery of these centuries rather than so little. Some of these works have been preserved for us by the merest chance. There have been many centuries since their time, when what these surgeons wrote would have been thought of very little value because physicians were not educated up to them. In spite of this liability to loss, which must have caused the destruction of many valuable works, we still have enough to show us what wonderful men were these surgeons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who anticipated our best thinking of the modern times in many of the most difficult problems. It is only during the last twenty-five years that anything like justice has been done them. The only way to know what these men did and taught is to read their own works, and these have been buried in manuscript or hidden away in large folio volumes, printed very early in the history of printing, and considered so valuable that consultation of them was almost resented by librarians. Anyone who talks about the lack of surgery in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is supremely ignorant of the real course of history at this time, and when in addition he attributes the failure of surgery to develop to a trumped-up opposition of the Church or ecclesiastics, he is simply making a ridiculous exhibition of intolerance and of foolish readiness to accept anything, however groundless, that may {190} enable him to make out a case against the ecclesiastical authorities. It is curious to reflect that in spite of all this wonderful progress in surgery, somehow there has crept in the tradition which has been very generally accepted by historians not acquainted with the details of medical history, that surgery was neglected during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The existence of this tradition, and its acceptance by men who had no idea that they were being influenced by that peculiar state of mind which considers that nothing good can come out of the Nazareth of the times before the reformation so-called, is of itself a warning with regard to the way history has been written, especially for the Teutonic and English-speaking peoples, that should carry weight in other departments of history beside medicine and surgery.