a journey of hundreds of miles into Italy,
in order to make his post-graduate studies. Italy occupied the place in
science at that time that Germany has taken during the nineteenth
century. A young man who wanted to get into touch with the great
masters in medicine naturally went down into the Peninsula. Traditions
as to the attitude of the Church to science notwithstanding, Italy where
education was more completely under the influence of the Popes and
ecclesiastics than in any other country in Europe, continued to be the
home of post-graduate work in science for the next four centuries.
Almost needless to say, the journey to Italy was more difficult of
accomplishment and involved more expense and time than would even the
voyage from America to Europe in our time. Chauliac realized, however,
that both time and expense would be well rewarded, and his ardor for the
rounding out of his education was amply recompensed by the event. Nor
have we any reason for thinking that what he did was very rare, much
less unique, in his time. Many a student from France, Germany, and
England made the long journey to Italy for post-graduate opportunities
during the later Middle Ages.

Even this post-graduate experience in Italy did not satisfy Chauliac,
however, for, after having studied several years with the most
distinguished Italian teachers of anatomy and surgery, he spent some
time in Paris, apparently so as to be sure that he would be acquainted
with the best that was being done in his specialty in every part of the
world. He then settled down to his own life work, carrying his Italian
and French masters' teachings well beyond the point where he received
them, and after years of personal experience he gathered together his
masters' ideas, tested by his own observations, into his "Chirurgia
Magna," a great text-book of surgery which sums up the whole subject
succinctly, yet completely, for succeeding generations. When we talk
about what he accomplished for surgery, we are not dependent on
traditions nor vague information gleaned from contemporaries and
successors, who might perhaps have been so much impressed by his
personality as to be made over-enthusiastic in their critical judgment
of him. We know the man in his surgical works, and they have continued
to be classics in surgery ever since. It is an honorable distinction for
the medicine of the later fourteenth, the fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries that Guy de Chauliac's book wa