Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/476

472 then practised at Lyons, and later taught at Paris, where he attracted great numbers of students by his fame as a teacher and an operator. He completed his "Chirurgia Magna" in 1296. Ten years later he died, but meanwhile he had transferred the center of the surgical world from Italy to France. Lanfranc was probably the first surgeon to absolutely distinguish between nerve and tendon, and he was the first to advocate and practise nerve suture.

Henry de Mondeville, or Henricus, was a Norman, little known until modern times. The first printed edition of his book was edited by Professor Pagel, in Berlin, in 1892. Mondeville was a scholar and a traveler. Born in France, he studied under Theodoric in Italy, and later at Montpellier and Paris. He afterwards lectured in both of these universities. He was a very busy man—a teacher, a consultant and one of the physicians to King Philip le Bel. We see in him the not unfamiliar picture of the famous surgeon trying to make time for his writing. He died before he was forty of some lung disease—probably tuberculosis. He sketched the earlier chapters of his work on his sick bed, but wrote the practical portion at length in the last chapter so that his students might profit by his experience. He was a shining example of the wide culture and erudition of the university-trained surgeon of his day, quoting, as he did, not only from the Latin, Greek and Arabian authorities on medicine, but also from Cato, Diogenes, Horace, Ovid, Plato, Seneca and other classics not popularly known until the Renaissance. Mondeville used a large magnet to extract portions of iron from tissues, and invented an instrument for extracting barbed arrows from the flesh. He wrote intelligently on the nursing problem, and spoke of the difficulties to the surgeon when wives nursed their husbands. A chapter on the history of surgery is a novel feature of his book. He was one of the first, if not the very first, to use illustrations in teaching anatomy.

Yperman, who was sent by the town of his name in Belgium to Paris in order to learn surgery, fulfilled his mission, and returning to his native town, practised and wrote two books on surgery in Flemish. John Ardern, an Englishman, studied at Montpellier, and, returning to England, practised and wrote on surgery. The "Practica" is a comprehensive work by this English surgeon, containing many case histories. He was a skillful operator, especially famed as a proctologist, and was the first surgeon to collect careful statistics of his eases. His book is illustrated, and he writes on what we now recognize as appendicitis under the title "Against Colic and the Iliac Passion." Ardern was the first great English surgeon.

We are inclined to deny to the middle ages anything approaching our tolerance of thought in the domain of education. The idea of coeducation, and women in the learned professions, would seem to be