Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/519



happens in our own time How much do you suppose I care whether Galen's, or Avicenna's, or Guy de Chauliac's opinion does or does not agree with mine? Every such opinion—it should be remembered—was, at one time or another in their day, a new [and therefore unproved] opinion In practical surgery much more importance attaches to the manner in which one carries out one's manipulations, and to the amount of experience which one may have acquired, than to the length of time which one devotes to windy consultations.

Fortune conferred very few favors upon Wuertz in the course of his career; the aid granted by kings and princes played no part in the moulding of his character; his greatness was entirely due to his own unaided efforts. Paré, on the other hand, was certainly one of Fortune's favorites. He, too, like Franco and Wuertz, began his professional life as a barber's apprentice, but, as he was made of a much finer clay, the ultimate product of his development was a princely surgeon, perhaps no more efficient or skilful than his two distinguished contemporaries, but unquestionably more many-sided, more lovable than either of them. On the other hand, Wuertz rendered a most valuable service to the science of surgery by his close and patient study of certain symptoms which his confrères had overlooked or incorrectly interpreted (such, for example, as pyaemia, hospital gangrene and septicaemia); and he thus established the fact that these were in reality independent diseases.