Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/495

 keeping secret the technique of certain operative procedures like that of cutting for stone in the bladder or that of the radical cure of hernia. Such knowledge was treated as private property, and was very carefully handed down from father to son, or was sold for a large sum of money to certain surgeons who engaged, under oath, not to reveal the details to others. Thus we are assured by Haeser that two such eminent surgeons as Ambroise Paré and Fabricius of Hilden were obliged to pay handsomely for the information which they received from certain specialists concerning their particular methods of procedure. It is from such scraps of information which come to our knowledge casually that we often learn the actual truth concerning the advance made at a given period of time by a certain department of medical science. Although it is not possible to fix the date when the custom to which I have just referred was definitely abandoned, it may be stated as a fact that after the seventeenth century very few instances of such ownership of surgical secrets are discoverable in the records.

Inasmuch as at the very beginning of the Renaissance surgery was looked upon, in the southern and central parts of Europe, as an occupation of a somewhat menial character, the regularly organized medical schools made very inadequate provision for the proper education and training of those young men who were disposed to adopt a surgical career. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries surgery was still tolerated at Montpellier, but after the papal seat had been removed from Avignon to Rome—that is, after 1479,—the pupils of that university were forbidden to do any surgical work. In 1490, however, a course in surgery was provided for the exclusive use of barbers. At first the instruction was given in Latin, but, as these men did not understand this language, the professor was soon compelled to employ a barbaric Latin (half French and half Latin) in making his comments upon the text of the lecture. This state of affairs lasted for more than a century. In fact, it was not until after Paré, Franco and Wuertz had demonstrated by their remarkable careers