ght prove dangerous to Church authority. They were
thus able to satisfy some of men's cravings for information in these
matters, and yet prevent them from making such advances as would
endanger the Church's policy of having them apply for prayers and
Masses rather than for more physical remedies, {5} except possibly for
certain minor ailments. We do not doubt that there are many educated
people who would be quite satisfied to accept this as a complete
explanation of the situation in medical education at the medieval
universities. Those who have read Dr. White's "History of the Warfare
of Theology with Science" and have placed any faith in his really
amusing excursions into a realm of which apparently he knows nothing--
the history of medicine--must believe something like this. For them a
little glance at even a few of the realities of medical teaching in
the thirteenth century will show at once what a castle of the
imagination they have been living in.

Only those who are thoroughly and completely ignorant of the real
status of medical teaching in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
continue to hold these absurd opinions as to the nullity of medieval
medicine and surgery. The reading of a single short recent
contribution to medical history, the address of Professor Clifford
Allbutt, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge,
England, before the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Exposition
held in St. Louis in 1904, "On the Historical Relations of Medicine
and Surgery down to the Sixteenth Century," would suffice to eradicate
completely such traditional errors. He pointed out some surprising
anticipations of what is most modern in medicine and surgery in the
teachings of William of Salicet and his pupil Lanfranc, Professors of
Medicine and Surgery in the Italian Universities and in Paris during
the thirteenth century. As these two professors were the most
distinguished teachers of surgery of the period and the acknowledged
leaders of thought in their time, their teaching may fairly be taken
as {6} representative of the curricula of medieval medical schools.
William of Salicet, according to Professor Allbutt, taught that dropsy
was due to a hardening of the kidneys; _durities renum_ are his exact
words. He insisted on the danger of wounds of the neck. He taught the
suture of divided nerves and gave explicit directions how to find the
severed ends. He made a special study of suppurative disease of th