204 INTERNAL MEDICINE 







by free suppuration, used the medicated tents, or in case of thorough 

 penetration, the setons which were to arouse the angry antagon- 

 ism of Wiirtz. 



Felix Wiirtz, like Franco and Pare, had also the good fortune 

 to escape a scholastic education; he was lucky enough, however, to 

 enjoy the liberal education of Gesner's friendship, and to listen 

 to the fiery disputes of Paracelsus. Gifted with an independent 

 and penetrating mind, he is as fresh and racy as Henry of Monde- 

 ville had genius enough to be in spite of the schools. Like all his 

 compatriots, he wrote in the vernacular; and for its originality 

 and conciseness, Wurtz's Practica, published in 1563, stands in 

 a very small company. Had he known as much anatomy as Pare, 

 his defect in which he bewails, he might have been as great a man, 

 for his clinical advances were both new and important. He pro- 

 tests against the kind of examinations for practice held in some 

 cities where candidates patter off cut and dried phrases like par- 

 rots, while apprentices "play upon the old fiddle the old tune con- 

 tinually." By setting his face against cataplasms and grease, he 

 made for progress, though neither he nor Pare attacked suppura- 

 tion in principle as Theodoric and Henry had done. His chief title 

 to fame, a fame far less ripe of course than that of Sydenham, but, 

 as it seems to me, not unworthy to be remembered beside it, lies 

 in his clinical acumen, and especially in his conception of wound 

 infections and their results. His description of diphtheria is espe- 

 cially remarkable. 



While surgeons from generation to generation were making the 

 solid progress I have indicated, what were the physicians about? 

 Now, of the fantastic conceits they were spinning, of the gross and 

 blundering receipts with which they stuffed their books, I have 

 not time to speak; fortunately, history has but too well prepared 

 you to dispense with this side of the story. One example I will 

 give you: In the sixteenth century the air was rent by the clamor 

 of physicians contending in two camps with such ardor and with 

 such acrimony that the Pope, and even Charles the Fifth, inter- 

 fered and on what momentous principle? Whether, in such a 

 disease as pleuro-pneumonia, venesection was to be practiced on 

 the same side as the disease or on the opposite side? Brissot, who 

 questioned the Galenical tradition in this matter, was declared 

 by the Emperor to be a worse heretic than Luther. Unfortunately 

 for Imperial medicine, if indifferently for science and the public 

 weal, it came out, on the recovery of the text of Hippocrates, that 

 Brissot had happened to be on the side of the father of medicine. 



England, if by England we mean no more than the Isles of Britain, 

 makes no great show in medieval or renascence surgery. Arderne 

 was probably a far better surgeon than Gilbert or John of Gaddes- 



