Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/19

Rh brain, and the patient’s recovery, and prefers the operation for hernia by caustic to the knife or cautery, asserting that he had seen it performed thirty times with success.

, surgeon to St. Louis, instituted under royal authority the Faculty or Society of Surgeons at Paris in 1268, and thus laid the foundation of the artificial distinction between surgery and medicine which subsists, whether for better or worse, in the capital cities of Europe at the present day.

But long after the stirring spirit of the Crusades had roused Europe, and awakened the arts and sciences from their profound lethargy, surgery remained in a state of deplorable degradation. ‘The chivalrous spirit of the holy wars had confided the practice of it to women, and the faith and hopes of the wounded knight reposed exclusively on the skill of his mistress. I pass over as little worthy of narration, save as a picture of "the age and body of the time,” the squabbles for pre-eminence between the ecclesiastics and the lay professors; the prohibition laid upon the priests by the famous Council of Tours, and various Papal edicts, to shed blood, or to be present at the performance of any operation; of the lay surgeons to contract marriage, and to hold their meetings as hitherto in the churches; and the alternate vexations which passed for nearly two centuries