RELATIONS OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY 201 



cropsy to reveal what he called not exactly "the secret causes," 

 but the hidden causes of diseases. Before Vasalius, Eustachius, 

 or Fallopius were born, deliberately and clear-sightedly he opened 

 the bodies of the dead as keenly as any pathologist in the more 

 spacious times of Morgagni, Haller, or Senac, or of Hunter, Baillie, 

 and Bright. Among his pathological reports are morbus coxae (two 

 cases), biliary calculus (two cases), abscess of the mesentery, throm- 

 bosis of the mesenteric vessels, stenosis of the intestine, "polypus" 

 of the heart, scirrhus of the pylorus, ruptured bowel (two cases). 

 He gives a good description of senile gangrene. Thus necropsy 

 was first brought into practice to supplement the autopsy which 

 the surgeon had long practiced in the living subject. 



It would be unjust to forget that in the latter half of the fifteenth 

 century Paris admitted some reforms; celibacy for physicians 

 was abolished, and with it diminished the allurements of prebends 

 and rectories, and the pernicious practice of the "me"decins reclus" 

 who did not visit patients nor even see them, but received visits 

 from ambassadors who brought gifts and vessels of urine, and 

 carried back answers far more presumptuous than the well-known 

 counsel of Falstaff's physician. Still not only was reform in Paris 

 very grudging, but it was capriciously favored and thwarted by 

 the French court. The faculty denied to St. Come "esoteric" teach- 

 ing, diagnosis, and the use of medical therapeutics; a jealousy 

 which ended in the physician being requested to do little more 

 than write the prescription. Aristotle was quoted as unfavorable 

 to the "vulgarizing of science." Joubert was attacked for editing 

 Guy in the vernacular. Fortunately the surgeons were carried into 

 the field of battle, a far better school than the Paris Faculty. 



Thus it was that in the opening of that great century in the 

 history of the human mind, the sixteenth century, we find Italian 

 medicine still in the van, until the birth of the great French sur- 

 geons, Franco and Pare", and of Gersdorff and Wiirtz in Germany. 



Franco, like Pare, was no clerk; he came of a class lower even 

 than that of Pare and the barbers, the wayfaring class of bone- 

 setters, oculists, plastic operators, and cutters for stone and 

 hernia; "runagates," as Gale calls them. Thus dangerous visceral 

 operations, and those on the eye, which but too often were swiftly 

 disastrous, fell into the hands of wandering and irresponsible crafts- 

 men, men of low origin, and too often ignorant, reckless, and rapa- 

 cious. As the truss was a very clumsy instrument, at any rate till 

 the end of the seventeenth century, the radical cure of hernia was 

 in great demand. It is not the least of the merits of Franco that 

 he brought these operations within the lines of responsible surgery, 

 and thrust them into the ken of Par6 and Fabricius. This illustrious 

 Provencal surgeon "ce beau genie chirurgical," as Malgaigne 



