1 66 MEDICAL SCIENCES. 



lieutenants of the chief barber. Each new master barber obtained " a letter 

 sealed with seals " from the chief of the corporation, in exchange for a sum 

 of five sous, and he also paid two sous six deniers for a copy of the annual 

 almanac, in which were recorded the days of the year favourable for bleeding 

 or the reverse. 



The St. Cosmo surgeons, not caring to carry on the struggle against the 

 barbers, especially after one of them, Oliver le Daim, had become the favourite 

 of Louis XI., sought to obtain the title of students of the University of Paris, 

 together with the privileges, franchises, liberties, and exemptions attaching 

 thereto. The University granted their request, but upon condition of their 

 following the lectures of the doctor- regents of the Faculty of Medicine. 

 Thus the surgeons were once more placed beneath the sway of the physicians, 

 while the barbers, unrestricted in the exercise of their profession, obtained 

 one of the sixty banners distributed by Louis XI. to the corporations of arts 

 and trades of the capital (Figs. 115 to 120). Nor was this all. The surgeons, 

 forgetting that the speciality of their art was manual work, abandoned to the 

 barbers cases of incision, dislocation, and fracture, confining themselves to 

 writing prescriptions or recipes, which, according to the University statutes, 

 appertained to the masters of the faculty, and not to the surgeons. 



Ttiis constituted the final triumph of the plebeian over the aristocratic 

 surgeons, and henceforth the barbers formed the most active and useful 

 section of the surgical body. They were to be met with, the lance or bistouri 

 in their hands, not only, in times of peace, in towns and villages, but, in time 

 of war, in the wake of armies and with expeditions to distant lands. But for 

 them there would have been no such thing as military surgery. The intes- 

 tine quarrels of the doctors did not get beyond the faculties, and, notwith- 

 standing their irreconcilable differences of opinions and systems, the science 

 of medicine was implicitly confided in by the public both in France and Italy. 

 Most of the doctors continued to be in the fifteenth, as they had been in the 

 fourteenth century, superstitious worshippers of the Arabic astrology, and 

 blind imitators of their ignorant and empirical predecessors. They attributed 

 to the seasons, to the lunar periods, and to the hours of the day and the 

 night a direct action upon the humours of the human body. The general 

 belief was that the blood rose, during the daytime, towards the sun, and 

 descended into the lower extremities at night ; that at the third hour the 

 bile subsided, so that its acrid qualities might not be mixed with the course 



