ddle Ages
as it is now, that {9} the messenger of Divine Mercy should handle the
knife and spill blood, or that the pastor of souls should come
straight from the operating room to bring consolation to the afflicted
and the dying.

Much more might be said about the wonderful medical teaching of the
thirteenth century. The men who made the universities what they have
continued to be down to the present time, had open minds for any great
advances that might come. Accordingly, when the histories of
anesthesia tell us that there was a form of anesthesia introduced
during the thirteenth century by Ugo da Lucca, and that even some
method of inhalation was employed for this purpose, it will be a
surprise only to those who have never properly realized all that our
educational forefathers of the early university days succeeded in
accomplishing.

Down at Montpelier, Gilbert the Englishman taught that small-pox
patients should be treated in rooms with red hangings, red curtains
being especially advised for the doors and windows. This is what
Finsen re-discovered in the nineteenth century, and for it was given
the Nobel prize in the twentieth century. He found that small-pox
patients suffered much less, that their fever was shorter, and that
the after effects were much less marked when only red light was
admitted to them. One may well ask what drugs did they employ, and
perhaps conclude that because they knew very little of drugs,
therefore they knew little of medicine. It is in the use of drugs,
however, that medicine has always been at its weakest, and we scarcely
need Oliver Wendel Holmes's declaration, that if all the drugs men
used up to his time had been thrown into the sea, they would be better
rather than worse off for it; nor Professor Osier's many {10} emphatic
protests with regard to our ignorance of drugs, to make the world of
the present day realize that a generation's use of them as a test
would tell quite as severely against the eighteenth or the nineteenth
century, as against the thirteenth or the fourteenth. They did use
opium, however, the drug having been introduced into general practice,
it is said, by a distinguished Papal physician, Simon Januensis.
Mandrake was employed, and has not as yet gone entirely out of use.
Various herbal decoctions were employed, and though these were used
entirely on empiric grounds, some at least of them have continued in
use with no better reason for their employment during most