MEDICAL SCIENCES. , 49 



suffering. The learned have often sought to discover whether in the Middle 

 Ages there existed such a thing as military surgery properly so called. It 

 is true that no allusion is made to it in history until the fourteenth century, 

 but in the most ancient chronicles mention is continually being made of 

 some monk or clerk as accompanying the army ; and it may be assumed 

 that he was a mire, or physician, or barber, according to the terms then used, 

 whose duty it was to tend the wounded and care for the sick. It is 

 impossible, in fact, to suppose any warlike expedition taking place without 

 some one more or less skilled in surgery forming part of it ; and it is easy 

 to understand that the first military surgeons were ecclesiastics, as the 

 Church had a virtual monopoly of the science of medicine. In course of time 

 the urban and municipal associations, which had obtained from the feudal 

 lord their communal rights, sought to free themselves from the vassalage 

 imposed by the Church. This was how the barbers were promoted to the 

 rank of subordinate surgeons, arid 'in every town of any importance a certain 

 number of men were paid a fixed salary, and undertook, in return, to attend 

 the poor, and follow to the wars the man whom the commune had to furnish 

 at the bidding of the lord of the soil. In many foreign countries, such as 

 Holland, Italy, and Germany, even more than in France, the populous and 

 wealthy towns engaged in the public service, and at a comparatively small 

 cost, one or more surgeons, nearly all of whom had been educated in the 

 monastic schools, and who were, therefore, well fitted for what were then 

 called works of mercy. Of these was Hugh of Lucca, who, appointed 

 physician at Parma, received but a lump sum of six hundred livres for his 

 services as long as he lived. This was the origin of the Stadts Phi/sikits in 

 Germany, and of the salaried surgeons and physicians in France, who, after 

 having been for two centuries the rivals of the monks in medicine, were 

 at last enabled to practise without let or hindrance, and to form civil 

 corporations, to which the Crown granted certain privileges and statutes. 



From the reign of Alexis I. (1081) the Emperors of the East accorded 

 their protection to the literary and scientific studies which flourished in their 

 empire far more than they did in the West. Though they had no particular 

 fondness for medical sciences, the latter were held in high esteem at Bagdad 

 and Constantinople ; but the philosophical character of the art was disfigured 

 by the shameless devices of astrology and quackery. During the reign of 

 Manuel Conmenus, from 1143 to 1180, Conrad II., Emperor of Germany, 



