the
first quarter of the fourteenth century. One of Chauliac's
fellow-students at Montpellier was John of Gaddesden, the first English
Royal Physician by official appointment of whom we have any account.
John is mentioned by Chaucer in his "Doctor of Physic," and is usually
looked upon as one of the fathers of English medicine. Chauliac did not
think much of him, though his reason for his dislike of him will
probably be somewhat startling to those who assume that the men of the
Middle Ages always clung servilely to authority. Chauliac's objection to
Gaddesden's book is that he merely repeats his masters and does not dare
to think for himself. It is not hard to understand that such an
independent thinker as Chauliac should have been utterly dissatisfied
with a book that did not go beyond the forefathers in medicine that the
author quotes. This is the explanation of his well-known expression,
"Last of all arose the scentless rose of England ['Rosa Angliae' was the
name of John of Gaddesden's book], in which, on its being sent to me, I
hoped to find the odor of sweet originality, but instead of that I
encountered only the fictions of Hispanus, of Gilbert, and of
Theodoric."

The presence of a Scotch professor and an English fellow-student,
afterwards a royal physician, at Montpellier, at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, shows how much more cosmopolitan was university life
in those times than we are prone to think, and what attraction a great
university medical school possessed even for men from long distances.

After receiving his degree of Doctor of Medicine at Montpellier Chauliac
went, as we have said, to Bologna. Here he attracted the attention and
received the special instruction of Bertruccio, who was attracting
students from all over Europe at this time and was making some
excellent demonstrations in anatomy, employing human dissections very
freely. Chauliac tells of the methods that Bertruccio used in order that
bodies might be in as good condition as possible for demonstration
purposes, and mentions the fact that he saw him do many dissections in
different ways.

In Roth's life of Vesalius, which is usually considered one of our most
authoritative medical historical works not only with regard to the
details of Vesalius' life, but also in all that concerns anatomy about
that time and for some centuries before, there is a passage quoted from
Chauliac himself which shows how freely dissection was practised