Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/498

 things, that "they will give due honor and reverence to the Faculty, and will not administer any laxative or alterative drug."

From 1601 to 1731, when the Académie de Chirurgie was founded, there was an almost continuous series of squabbles between the surgeons and the barbers, on the one hand, and the Medical Faculty of the University, on the other. At a still earlier period, dating back even to the fourteenth century, the quarrels were between the surgeons (École de St. Côme) and the barbers, but, during the seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth, the surgeons and the barbers seem to have harmonized their interests and to have made common cause against the Faculty. An edict was issued by Louis the Twelfth in 1613 to the effect that the two corporations (the surgeons and the barbers) should be fused into a single organization; and, even before this, it had become customary to employ the words "surgeon" and "barber" as synonymous terms. Finally, in the years 1644, 1645 and 1656, further agreements were entered into by the two bodies. After the founding of the Academy of Surgery in 1731 nothing further is heard of barber-surgeons.

In the account which I have thus far given of the agencies that were available during the Renaissance for the perpetuation and increase of medical knowledge, I make reference only to the established medical schools and to the less pretentious but much more practical teaching organizations furnished by the guilds or brotherhoods. In my remarks I have said little or nothing about hospitals, which—potentially, at least,—have a great deal to do with the advance of medical knowledge, especially in the department of surgery. Unfortunately, my efforts to procure information relating to this subject have not been rewarded with much success and I shall therefore not be able to furnish more than a few disconnected and very imperfect details.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the city of Lyons possessed (and it still possesses) the oldest hospital in France—viz., the Hôtel-Dieu,—which was founded by Childebert the First in 542 A. D. The city itself was at