e
hip and taught many practical things with regard to it. He taught,
though this is a bit of knowledge supposed to come three centuries
later into medicine and history, the true origin of chancre and
phagedena. Most surprising of all, however, remains. William
substituted the use of the knife for the abuse of the cautery, which
had been introduced by the Arabs because they feared hemorrhage, and
he insisted that hemorrhage could be controlled by proper means
without searing the tissues, and that the wounds made by the knife
healed ever so much more kindly and with less danger to the patient.
In the matter of wound healing, he investigated the causes of the
failure of healing by first intention, and expressed on this subject
some marvelous ideas that are supposed to be of late nineteenth
century origin.

While it is usually said that whatever teaching of science was done at
medieval universities, was so entirely speculative or purely theoretic
and so thoroughly impractical as not to be of any serious use for life
and its problems, the utter falsity of such declarations can be seen
from the fact that William of Salicet insisted on teaching medicine by
clinical methods, always discussed cases with his students, and his
medical and surgical works contain many case histories. This is just
what pretentiously ignorant historians of medical education {7} have
often emphatically declared that medieval teachers did not do, but
should have done, in the Middle Ages. It is not surprising then to
find that William himself, and his great pupil Lanfranc, insisted on
the utter inadvisability of separating medicine and surgery in such a
way that the physician would not have the opportunity to be present at
operations, and thus gain more definite knowledge about the actual
conditions of various organs which he had tried to investigate from
the surface of the body. It is a very curious coincidence that both
the Regius Professors of Physic in England at the present time, our
own Professor Osler, now at Oxford, as well as his colleague,
Professor Allbutt, of Cambridge, have within the last five years
emphasized this same idea in almost the very words which were used by
William and Lanfranc nearly seven hundred years ago. Lanfranc went
even beyond his master in practical applications of important
scientific principles to medicine and surgery. He added to the means
of controlling hemorrhage. In arterial hemorrhage he suggested digital
compre