458 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



did their best to obtain union by cleansing, desiccation and refreshing of the 

 edges. Upon the outer surface they laid only lint steeped in wine. Powders 

 they regarded as too desiccating, for powder shuts in decomposing matters; 

 wine after washing purifying and drying the raw surfaces evaporates. 



Almost needless to say these are exactly the principles of aseptic 

 surgery. The wine was the best antiseptic that they could use and we 

 still use alcohol in certain cases. It would seem to many quite im- 

 possible that such operations as are described could have been done 

 without anesthetics, but they were not done without anesthetics. There 

 were two or three different forms of anesthesia used during the thir- 

 teenth and fourteenth centuries. One method employed by Ugo da 

 Lucca consisted of the use of an inhalant. We do not know what the 

 material employed was. There are definite records, however, of its 

 rather frequent employment. 



What a different picture of science at the medieval universities all 

 this makes from what we have been accustomed to hear and read with 

 regard to them. It is difficult to understand where the old false im- 

 pressions came from. The picture of university work that recent his- 

 torical research has given us shows us professors and students busy 

 with science in every department, making magnificent advances, many 

 of which were afterwards forgotten, or at least allowed to lapse into 

 desuetude. 



The positive assertions with regard to old-time ignorance were all 

 made in the course of religious controversy. In English-speaking 

 countries particularly it became a definite purpose to represent the old 

 church as very much opposed to education of all kinds and above all to 

 scientific education. There is not a trace of that to be found anywhere, 

 but there were many documents that were appealed to to confirm the 

 protestant view. There was a papal bull, for instance, said to forbid 

 dissection. When read it proves to forbid the cutting up of bodies to 

 carry them to a distance for burial, an abuse which caused the spread 

 of disease, and was properly prohibited. The church prohibition was in- 

 ternational and therefore effective. At the time the bull was issued there 

 were twenty medical schools doing dissection in Italy and they continued 

 to practise it quite undisturbed during succeeding centuries. The 

 papal physicians were among the greatest dissectors. Dissections were 

 done at Rome and the cardinals attended them. Bologna at the height 

 of its fame was in the Papal States. All this has been ignored and the 

 supposed bull against anatomy emphasized as representing the keynote 

 of medical and surgical history. Then there was a papal decree for- 

 bidding the making of gold and silver. This was said to forbid chem- 

 istry or alchemy and so prevent scientific progress. The history of the 

 medical schools of the time shows that it did no such thing. The great 

 alchemists of the time doing really scientific work were all clergymen, 

 many of them very prominent ecclesiastics. 



