200 INTERNAL MEDICINE 



that Fallopius compared the author to Hippocrates, and that John 

 Freind calls him the prince of surgeons. The work is rich, aphoris- 

 tic, orderly, and precise. Guy was a more adventurous surgeon 

 than Lanfranc, as was Franco, a later Provengal, than Pare. He did 

 not cut for stone, but he operated for radical cure of hernia and 

 for cataract; operations till his time left wholly to the wayfaring 

 specialists. In Guy the critical spirit was awake. He scorns the 

 physicians of his day, "who followed each other like cranes, whether 

 for fear or love he would not say." In respect of principles, how- 

 ever, Guy was not infallible. Too sedulous a disciple of Galen, he 

 was as a deaf adder to the new message of Hugh, Theodoric, and 

 Henry; and not only was he deaf himself, but, as the authorita- 

 tive master of the early renascence, he closed the ears of his brethren 

 and successors, even to the day of Lister. 



This vigorous life which surgery gave to the medicine of the 

 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was stifled in the West by the 

 pride and bigotry which, culminating in the Council of Tours, had 

 thrust surgery down into the ranks of illiterate barbers, reckless 

 specialists, and adventurous charlatans. In Italy, however, the 

 genius and bent of the people for art as well as for philosophy, 

 and the ascendency of the secular element in the universities, still 

 kept surgery in its place as "the scientific arm of medicine." 1 

 Thus in Italy of the fifteenth century surgery did not droop as it 

 did in the West; if it slumbered for a spell, it soon awoke again, 

 refreshed in the new Hellenism. Pietro di Argelata (d. 1423), Doc- 

 tor of Arts and Medicine, and professor of Bologna, wrote an excel- 

 lent Surgery full of personal observation ; and perhaps for the first 

 time, was frank about his own mistakes. Bertipaglia, another great 

 Paduan professor, flourished a little after Argelata, but was a 'man 

 of less originality. Argelata followed the lead of Henry and Guy in 

 some bolder adventure in operative work as distinguished from mere 

 wound-surgery, and was himself a learned and skillful practitioner. 



In the midst of the mainly Arabist professors of medicine of 

 the fifteenth century arose Benivieni, the forerunner of Morgagni, 

 and one of the greatest physicians of the late Middle Ages. This 

 distinguished man, who was born in 1448 and died in 1502, was not 

 a professor but a Doctor of Medicine, a man of culture and an emi- 

 nent practitioner in Florence. Although born in the new platonism, 

 he was, like Mondeville, one of those fresh and independent ob- 

 servers who surrender to no authority, to Arab nor Greek. Yet 

 for us Benivieni's fame is far more than all this; for he was the 

 founder of the craft of pathological anatomy. So far as I know, he 

 was the first to make the custom, and to declare the need of ne- 



1 A phrase which Sir John Burden Sanderson once used in my hearing. 





