RELATIONS OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY 195 



did not make any great mark on surgery; his tracts on the eye are 

 lost; but, so far as we know, his surgery was adopted in the main 

 from the Alexandrians and from Soranus. However, Galen success- 

 fully resected the sternum for caries, exposing the heart; and he 

 excised a splintered shoulder-blade: moreover, with all his bent to 

 speculative reason, we have no hint that he fell into the medieval 

 abyss of regarding surgery as unfit for a scholar and gentleman. 



After Soranus and Galen medicine came to the evening of its 

 second day, to the long night before the rise of the Arabian, Italian, 

 and French surgeons of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth 

 centuries. 



In spite of the docile industry of Greek physicians of the Byzantine 

 period, medicine gradually sank not into sterility only, but into 

 degradation. The wholesome discipline of practical surgery had 

 fallen off. Eastern folk, who bear heaven-sent sores with fatal 

 stoicism, shrunk from the profane hand of man; and the tradition 

 of Galen made for a plague of drugs which were least mischievous 

 when merely superfluous. Rhazes, Albucasis, Avicenna the Arabian 

 Galen, had entered by the door of the East into a great scientific 

 inheritance, and, if they did little to develop surgery, it still was with 

 them a grave and an honorable calling; with them medicine had not 

 yet lost her right arm. The small benefits of the Church to medicine 

 issued in a far greater treachery. The Greek of Ireland, and of England 

 in the time of Bede, was banished by Augustine and the Benedictine 

 missionaries; and the medicine of Monte Cassino, itself a farrago of 

 receipts, in the monkish hostels of the West fell lower and lower. 

 We have reason, however, to believe that even in the cloister some 

 fair surgery was making way, when it was finally abandoned to the 

 "secular arm" by the Council of Tours, in A. D. 1163; and books on 

 surgery and midwifery began to disappear from the clerical libraries. 

 The University of Paris excluded all those who worked with their 

 hands; so that its students of medicine had to abjure manual occu- 

 pation, and to content themselves with syllogisms and inspections of 

 urine, often, indeed, without any inspection of the patient himself. 

 From the University the Faculty of Medicine took its tone, and the 

 Surgical Corporation of St. Come aped the Faculty. But by the 

 expulsion of surgery from the liberal arts, and the societies of learned 

 men, medicine herself w r as eviscerated; thus was made the pernicious 

 bisection of medicine which has not yet spent its evil ; the inductive 

 foundations of the art were removed, and the clergy and the faculties, 

 in France and England at any rate, devoted all their zeal to shoring- 

 up the superstructure. Surgery saw its revenge, its bitter revenge; 

 but in the ruin of its temple. In the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 

 turies surgery, hated and avoided by medical faculties, scorned in 

 clerical and feudal circles, began in the hands of lowly and unlettered 



