While it is usually said that whatever teaching of science was done at medieval universities, was so entirely speculative or purely theoretic and so thoroughly impractical as not to be of any serious use for life and its problems, the utter falsity of such declarations can be seen from the fact that William of Salicet insisted on teaching medicine by clinical methods, always discussed cases with his students, and his medical and surgical works contain many case histories. This is just what pretentiously ignorant historians of medical education {7} have often emphatically declared that medieval teachers did not do, but should have done, in the Middle Ages. It is not surprising then to find that William himself, and his great pupil Lanfranc, insisted on the utter inadvisability of separating medicine and surgery in such a way that the physician would not have the opportunity to be present at operations, and thus gain more definite knowledge about the actual conditions of various organs which he had tried to investigate from the surface of the body. It is a very curious coincidence that both the Regius Professors of Physic in England at the present time, our own Professor Osler, now at Oxford, as well as his colleague, Professor Allbutt, of Cambridge, have within the last five years emphasized this same idea in almost the very words which were used by William and Lanfranc nearly seven hundred years ago. Lanfranc went even beyond his master in practical applications of important scientific principles to medicine and surgery. He added to the means of controlling hemorrhage. In arterial hemorrhage he suggested digital compression for an hour, or in severe cases ligature. His master had studied wounds of the neck. Lanfranc has a magnificent chapter on injuries of the head, which Professor Allbutt does not hesitate to call one of the classics of surgery. Lanfranc was thoroughly appreciated by his contemporaries. After years of study and teaching in Italy he was invited to Paris, where he became one of the lights of that great university. Both Salicet and Lanfranc did their wonderful work in scientific medicine down in Italy where ecclesiastical influence was strongest. Italy continued to be for the next six centuries always the home of the best medical schools in the world, to which the most ardent students from {8} all over the continent and even England went for the sake of the magnificent opportunities provided. It was literally true, in spite of the tradition of Church opposition to medical science, that the nearer to Rome the university the better its medical school; and as we shall see, Rome itself had the best medical school in the world for two centuries, while its greatest rival, often ahead of it in scientific achievement, always its peer, was the medical school of Bologna in the Papal States, directly under the control of the Popes since the beginning of the sixteenth century.