Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/494



GENERAL REMARKS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SURGERY IN EUROPE DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

In the early period of the Renaissance surgery was apparently the first of the practical branches of medicine to spring forward into active life. Anatomy,—that is, human anatomy,—the foundation that is absolutely necessary to the solid growth of surgery, scarcely existed before the beginning of the sixteenth century; and it is therefore not surprising that the records of the past reveal to us so very few instances of men who attained any eminence as surgeons. When this fact is taken into consideration I cannot help feeling that, in the sketches which I drew, on earlier pages, of Theodoric of Cervia, William of Saliceto, Lanfranchi of Milan (and later of France), Henri de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac, I gave to these men only a small fraction of the credit to which they were justly entitled. Indeed, the excellence of the work done by them and recorded in the treatises which they published, is so great as to arouse the suspicion that they had clandestinely acquired more knowledge of human anatomy than they dared to admit. The life of a dissector of human bodies, it should be remembered, was by no means safe in those days.

But the lack of a trustworthy knowledge of anatomy was not the only hindrance to a healthy development of the art of surgery. There were other obstacles which, up to a comparatively late period in the sixteenth century, continued to block the advance of this art. Of these, the principal one was perhaps the custom—not by any means considered at that period professionally dishonorable—of