Only those who are thoroughly and completely ignorant of the real status of medical teaching in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries continue to hold these absurd opinions as to the nullity of medieval medicine and surgery. The reading of a single short recent contribution to medical history, the address of Professor Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, England, before the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Exposition held in St. Louis in 1904, "On the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery down to the Sixteenth Century," would suffice to eradicate completely such traditional errors. He pointed out some surprising anticipations of what is most modern in medicine and surgery in the teachings of William of Salicet and his pupil Lanfranc, Professors of Medicine and Surgery in the Italian Universities and in Paris during the thirteenth century. As these two professors were the most distinguished teachers of surgery of the period and the acknowledged leaders of thought in their time, their teaching may fairly be taken as {6} representative of the curricula of medieval medical schools. William of Salicet, according to Professor Allbutt, taught that dropsy was due to a hardening of the kidneys; _durities renum_ are his exact words. He insisted on the danger of wounds of the neck. He taught the suture of divided nerves and gave explicit directions how to find the severed ends. He made a special study of suppurative disease of the hip and taught many practical things with regard to it. He taught, though this is a bit of knowledge supposed to come three centuries later into medicine and history, the true origin of chancre and phagedena. Most surprising of all, however, remains. William substituted the use of the knife for the abuse of the cautery, which had been introduced by the Arabs because they feared hemorrhage, and he insisted that hemorrhage could be controlled by proper means without searing the tissues, and that the wounds made by the knife healed ever so much more kindly and with less danger to the patient. In the matter of wound healing, he investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention, and expressed on this subject some marvelous ideas that are supposed to be of late nineteenth century origin.