Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/307

 Mondino, cultivated the study of anatomy much more earnestly than their rivals at Salerno had ever done, and the surgical methods which they adopted were of a more scientific character than those practiced by Roger. In the treatment of wounds, for example, instead of striving to bring about healing by the application of remedies which stimulate suppuration, they favored the dry method; in which practice they were justified not only by their own experience but also by Galen's teaching: "A dry state of the wound approaches more nearly to what may be considered the normal condition, whereas a moist state is surely unhealthy." (Methodi medend., IV., 5.) As an offset to the latter authority the Salerno surgeons quoted that particular aphorism of Hippocrates (V., 67) which reads: "Laxa bona, cruda vero mala."—almost the very opposite of Galen's doctrine. Then again, the Bologna surgeons effected improvements in other directions: They materially restricted the use of the red-hot cautery iron, and they cast aside as useless many of the complicated apparatuses which had previously been employed in the treatment of fractures and dislocations. It is evident from these facts that the Bologna surgeons were not, as were most of the physicians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Thaddeus of Florence perhaps excepted), slavish followers of the ancients or even of the more modern Arabs, but men who thought independently and who were not afraid to use their own powers of observation.

Hugo of Lucca.—Hugo Borgognoni, more commonly called Hugo of Lucca—was born in that city about the middle of the twelfth century, served as municipal physician to the city of Bologna, accompanied the Bolognese Crusaders on their expedition to Syria and Egypt, was present at the siege of Damietta in 1219 A. D., and died a short time before 1258, at the age of nearly one hundred. He acquired a great reputation as a surgeon and brought up several sons who followed in the same walk of life, among the number being Theodoric, who gained even greater celebrity than his father in the domain of surgery. As Hugo himself left no writings of any kind, we are