lity in which
more or less painless operations were possible. Very few of us have
realized, however, the perfection to which anaesthesia was developed, and
the possibility this provided for the great surgeons of the later
medieval centuries to do operations in all the great cavities of the
body, the skull, the thorax, and the abdomen, quite as they are done in
our own time and apparently with no little degree of success.

Of course, any such extensive surgical intervention even for serious
affections would have been worse than useless under the septic
conditions that would surely have prevailed if certain principles of
antisepsis were not applied. Until comparatively recent years we have
been quite confident in our assurance that antisepsis and asepsis were
entirely modern developments of surgery. More knowledge, however, of
the history of surgery has given a serious set-back to this
self-complacency, and now we know that the later medieval surgeons
understood practical antisepsis very well, and applied it successfully.
They used strong wine as a dressing for their wounds, insisted on
keeping them clean, and not allowing any extraneous material of any
kind, ointments or the like, to be used on them. As a consequence they
were able to secure excellent results in the healing of wounds, and they
were inclined to boast of the fact that their incisions healed by first
intention and that, indeed, the scar left after them was scarcely
noticeable. We know that wine would make a good antiseptic dressing, but
until we actually read the reports of the results obtained by these old
surgeons, we had no idea that it could be used to such excellent
purpose. Antisepsis, like anaesthesia, was marvellously anticipated by
the surgical forefathers of the medieval period.

It has always seemed to me that the story of Medieval Dentistry
presented an even better illustration of a great anticipatory
development of surgery. This department represents only a small surgical
specialty, but one which even at that period was given over to
specialists, who were called dentatores. Guy de Chauliac's review of the
dentistry of his time and the state of the specialty, as pictured by
John of Arcoli, is likely to be particularly interesting, because if
there is any department of medical practice that we are sure is
comparatively recent in origin, it is dentistry. Here, however, we find
that practically all our dental manipulations, the filling of teeth,