MEDICAL SCIENCES. 



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all of them in the habit of practising surgery, great inconvenience might 

 arise if they were absent from their houses when sent for during the 

 night." 



The surgeons, who continued to encroach upon the domain of the 

 physicians, but who were none the less jealous of their own privileges, 

 subjected the barbers to so many vexations that the authorities, tired of 

 being continually appealed to in order to settle some dispute between the two 

 corporations, formally defined the respective rights of both parties. The 



Fig. 106. The Physic-inn. Designed and engraved in the Sixteenth Century by J. Amman. 



decree of October 3rd, 1372, empowered the barbers " to apply plasters, oint- 

 ments, and other appropriate medicines for bruises, apostemes, and other open 

 wounds, not of a character likely to cause death, because physicians are men 

 of great estate and very expensive, whom the poor are not able to pay." 

 From this period, then, there were three distinct classes of persons exercising 

 medicine in its different stages : the long-robed practitioners, mirn or 

 lilii/xirinitx, representing the Faculty of Paris ; the short-robed surgeons, who 

 formed a corporation under the patronage of St. Cosmo and St. Damianus ; 

 and the barbers, entitled to carry a sword, who formed a business corporation, 



