SCIENCE AT TEE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES 457 



them in our day. Professor Richet, at the University of Paris, said 

 not long ago " the therapeutics of any generation is quite absurd to the 

 second succeeding generation." We shall not blame the medieval 

 generations for having accepted remedies that afterwards proved inert, 

 for every generation has done that, even our own. 



Their study of medicine was not without lasting accomplishment 

 however. They laid down the indications and the dosage for opium. 

 They used iron with success, they tried out many of the bitter tonics 

 among the herbal medicines, and they used laxatives and purgatives to 

 good advantage. Down at Montpelier, Gilbert, the Englishman, sug- 

 gested red light for smallpox because it shortened the fever, lessened 

 the lesions and made the disfigurement much less. Finsen was given 

 the Nobel prize partly for rediscovery of this. They segregated ery- 

 sipelas and so prevented its spread. They recognized the contagious- 

 ness of leprosy and though it was probably as wide-spread as tubercu- 

 losis is at the present time, they succeeded not only in controlling but 

 in eventually obliterating it throughout Europe. 



It was in surgery, however, that the greatest triumphs of teaching 

 of the medieval universities were secured. Most people are inclined to 

 think that surgery developed only in our day. The great surgeons of 

 the thirteenth and fourteenth century, however, anticipated most of our 

 teaching. They investigated the causes of the failure of healing by 

 first intention, recognized the danger of wounds of the neck, differen- 

 tiated the venereal diseases, described rabies and knew much of blood 

 poisoning, and operated very skilfully. We have their text-books 

 of surgery and they are a never-ending source of surprise. They 

 operated on the brain, on the thorax, on the abdominal cavity, and did 

 not hesitate to do most of the operations that modem surgeons do. 

 They operated for hernia by the radical cure, though Mondeville sug- 

 gested that more people were operated on for hernia for the benefit of 

 the doctor's pocket than for the benefit of the patient. Guy de Chauliac 

 declared that in wounds of the intestines patients would die unless the 

 intestinal lacerations were sewed up and he described the method of 

 suture and invented a needle holder. We have many wonderful in- 

 struments from these early days preserved in pictures at least, that 

 show us how much modem advance is merely reinvention. 



They understood the principles of aseptic surgery very well. They 

 declared that it was not necessary "that pus should be generated in 

 wounds." Professor Clifford AUbutt says: 



They washed the wound with wine, scrupulously removing every foreign 

 particle; then they brought the edges together, not allowing wine or anything 

 else to remain within — dry adhesive surfaces were their desire. Nature, they 

 said, produces the means of union in a viscous exudation, or natural balm, as 

 it was afterwards called by Paracelsus, Par6 and Wurtz. In older wounds they 



