Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/566

 CHAPTER XLI

SURGERY IN GREAT BRITAIN DURING THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

In Great Britain the cultivation of the science of medicine began at a much later date than it did on the continent of Europe, and, so far as may be judged from the facts within our reach, there were, in the early part of the sixteenth century, very few Englishmen who could justly lay claim to the possession of more than the rudiments of the art of surgery. Two centuries earlier, as I have already stated in a previous chapter, there were three men in England who gained considerable fame in this department of medicine. They were Gilbert "the Englishman" (1210), John of Gaddesden (1320), the author of the famous book entitled "Rosa Anglica," and John of Ardern (circa 1350); but afterward, for a period of nearly two hundred years, the records fail to reveal to us a single surgeon of any note. Then during the sixteenth century the only English surgeons whose names deserve to be perpetuated are Gale, Clowes and Woodall, of whom I shall presently give brief accounts. They were all at one time or another, as in the case of the leading continental surgeons of that period, officially connected with the army. Some idea of the unsatisfactory state of the medical service in the English army of that period may be gathered from the statements made by Gale regarding this matter. From his account it appears that in 1544 the army was accompanied by a miscellaneous crowd of men who were supposed to be in some measure physicians, but who in reality were uneducated quacks, vendors of all sorts of dressings and washes for wounds, of infallible cures for gunshot injuries, etc. The mortality