Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/321

 Montpellier, in the south of France, and at Bologna and Padua, in Italy, far outstripped her during this period. There was one physician at Paris, however,—Henri de Mondeville,—who would probably have proved a worthy successor of Lanfranchi if circumstances had not seriously interfered with his acting the part of a teacher.

Henri de Mondeville.—Henri de Mondeville, says Edouard Nicaise, was born about 1260 A. D. in Normandy. In his native village—Mondeville or Mandeville, or Amondaville, all of which names are found in the manuscripts—he was known simply as Henri, but in the outside world and in medical literature he is mentioned, in accordance with the prevailing custom of that period, as Henri de Mondeville. After studying medicine for a certain length of time in Paris and Montpellier, he went to Italy and became the pupil of Theodoric of Bologna. He is said to have been passionately fond of surgery, which at that period was, in France, a much despised branch of medicine. In Italy, on the contrary, such men as William of Saliceto, Hugo of Lucca, Theodoric and Lanfranchi had raised surgery to a position of great honor, and Henri de Mondeville cherished the hope that he also might be able to accomplish the same result in France. Upon his return to Paris he was chosen one of the physicians (there were four in all) of the royal household, and from that time onward he was frequently obliged to set aside, for longer or shorter periods, all his personal interests (private practice, lecturing to medical students, hospital service at Hôtel-Dieu, etc.) in order to attend the King or the Comte de Valois on some military expedition. This sort of service, however, was by no means time lost, for it afforded him the opportunity to acquire great experience in the treatment of wounds, an experience which reveals itself on almost every page of his treatise on surgery. And yet there came a time (1312) when de Mondeville complained bitterly of these interruptions, for which he received no pay and which interfered seriously with his literary work. Despite these hindrances, he appears to have made a fair degree of progress in the writing of his book, for at the date last