artificial dentures, even orthodontia, were anticipated by the dentists
of the Middle Ages. We have only the compressed account of it which is
to be found in text-books of general surgery, and while in this they
give mainly a heritage from the past, yet even this suffices to give us
a picture very surprising in its detailed anticipation of much that we
have been inclined to think of as quite modern in invention and
discovery.

Medicine developed much more slowly than surgery, or, rather, lagged
behind it, as it seems nearly always prone to do. Surgical problems are
simple, and their solution belongs to a great extent to a handicraft.
That is, after all, what chirurgy, the old form of our word surgery,
means. Medical problems are more complex and involve both art and
science, so that solutions of them are often merely temporary and lack
finality. During the Middle Ages, however, and especially towards the
end of them, the most important branches of medicine, diagnosis and
therapeutics, took definite shape on the foundations that lie at the
basis of our modern medical science. We hear of percussion for abdominal
conditions, and of the most careful study of the pulse and the
respiration. There are charts for the varying color of the urine, and of
the tints of the skin. With Nicholas of Cusa there came the definite
suggestion of the need of exact methods of diagnosis. A mathematician
himself, he wished to introduce mathematical methods into medical
diagnosis, and suggested that the pulse should be counted in connection
with the water clock, the water that passed being weighed, in order to
get very definite comparative values for the pulse rate under varying
conditions, and also that the specific gravity of fluids from the body
should be ascertained in order to get another definite datum in the
knowledge of disease. It was long before these suggestions were to bear
much fruit, but it is interesting to find them so clearly expressed.

At the very end of the Middle Ages came the father of modern
pharmaceutical chemistry, Basil Valentine. Already the spirit that was
to mean so much for scientific investigation in the Renaissance period
was abroad. Valentine, however, owes little to anything except his own
investigations, and they were surprisingly successful, considering the
circumstances of time and place. His practical suggestions so far as
drugs were concerned did not prove to have enduring value, but then this
has been a f