nt as
"_venerabilis et circumspectus vir, dominus Guido de Cauliaco, canonicus
et praepositus ecclesiae Sancti Justi Lugduni, medicusque domini Nostri
Papae_." All the rest of his life was passed in the Papal capital, which
Avignon was for some seventy years of the fourteenth century. He served
as chamberlain-physician to three Popes, Clement VI, Innocent VI, and
Urban V. We do not know the exact date of his death, but when Pope Urban
V went to Rome in 1367, Chauliac was putting the finishing touches on
his "Chirurgia Magna," which, as he tells us, was undertaken as a
_solatium senectutis_--a solace in old age. When Urban returned to
Avignon for a time in 1370 Chauliac was dead. His life work is summed up
for us in this great treatise on surgery, full of anticipations in
surgical procedures that we are prone to think much more modern.

Nicaise has emphasized the principles which guided Guy de Chauliac in
the choice and interpretation of his authorities by a quotation from Guy
himself, which is so different in its tone from what is usually supposed
to have been the attitude of mind of the men of science of the time that
it would be well for all those who want to understand the Middle Ages
better to have it near them. Speaking of the surgeons of his own and
immediately preceding generations, Guy says: "One thing particularly is
a source of annoyance to me in what these surgeons have written, and it
is that they follow one another like so many cranes. For one always says
what the other says. I do not know whether it is from fear or from love
that they do not deign to listen except to such things as they are
accustomed to and as have been proved by authorities. They have to my
mind understood very badly Aristotle's second book of metaphysics where
he shows that these two things, fear and love, are the greatest
obstacles on the road to the knowledge of the truth. Let them give up
such friendships and fears. 'Because while Socrates or Plato may be a
friend, truth is a greater friend.' Truth is a holy thing and worthy to
be honored above everything else. Let them follow the doctrine of Galen,
which is entirely made up of experience and reason, and in which one
investigates things and despises words."

After all, this is what great authorities in medicine have always
insisted on. Once every hundred years or so one finds a really great
observer who makes new observations and wakes the world up. He is
surprised that men should n