Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/497

 them to all others, as guardian saints. Cosmas and Damian were the youngest of five brothers who belonged to a family of some distinction in Arabia. They chose the career of peripatetic physicians, and gave their services free to those who might have need of them. They spent some time in the Province of Cilicia, Asia Minor, and while in that country they met the death of martyrs, somewhere about 287 A. D., during the persecutions of the Christians which occurred in the reign of Diocletian. In the church pictures they are represented as physicians, each one of whom holds in his hand either a vessel containing a remedial preparation, or a staff around which the emblematic serpent is twined, or (less frequently) a surgical instrument of some kind. During the time of the Crusades there existed an Order of Knights of Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, who devoted themselves specially to the care of sick pilgrims and to the freeing of those who were held as prisoners.

In all the large cities of France there existed, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, corporations of surgeons, the great majority of whom belonged to the class or grade of barbers. These men were not permitted by their rules to use the knife, and, as a result, great jealousy existed between them and the few who, having passed the required examination, were authorized to perform cutting operations and to assume the title of "Masters in Surgery." In 1493, as the result of an effort made by the barbers of Paris as a body, to gain some knowledge of medical science, they obtained from the university permission to purchase a corpse which had not yet been removed from the gallows. They had, it appears, engaged a doctor of medicine to give them instruction in anatomy, and it was upon a dissection of this body that the teaching was to be based. In 1494 the Faculty made provision for giving the barbers a regular course of lectures on surgery; and, eleven years later (1505), additional privileges having in the meantime been granted them by the university, they organized the "Corporation of Barber Surgeons, or Surgeons of the Short Robe." In the oath which the members of this organization were obliged to take, it is expressly stated, among other