the great windows over the
altars were filled with colored glass. Altogether it was one
of the best examples of the best period of Gothic
Architecture."[24]

The fine hospital thus described was but one of many. Virchow, in his
article on hospitals quoted in the same chapter, called attention to the
fact that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries every town of five
thousand or more inhabitants had its hospital, founded on the model of
the great Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, and all of them did good work.
The surgeons of Guy de Chauliac's time would indeed find hospitals
wherever they might be called in consultation, even in small towns. They
were more numerous in proportion to population than our own and, as a
rule, at least as well organized as ours were until the last few years.

It is no wonder that with such a good hospital organization excellent
surgery was accomplished. Hernia was Chauliac's specialty, and in it his
surgical judgment is admirable. Mondeville before his time did not
hesitate to say that many operations for hernia were done not for the
benefit of the patient, but for the benefit of the surgeon,--a very
striking anticipation of remarks that one sometimes hears even at the
present time. Chauliac discussed operations for hernia very
conservatively. His rule was that a truss should be worn, and no
operation attempted unless the patient's life was endangered by the
hernia. It is to him that we owe the invention of a well-developed
method of taxis, or manipulation of a hernia, to bring about its
reduction, which was in use until the end of the nineteenth century. He
suggested that trusses could not be made according to rule, but must be
adapted to each individual case. He invented several forms of truss
himself, and in general it may be said that his manipulative skill and
his power to apply his mechanical principles to his work are the most
characteristic of his qualities. This is particularly noteworthy in his
chapters on fractures and dislocations, in which he suggests various
methods of reduction and realizes very practically the mechanical
difficulties that were to be encountered in the correction of the
deformities due to these pathological conditions. In a word, we have a
picture of the skilled surgeon of the modern time in this treatise of a
fourteenth-century teacher of surgery.

Chauliac discusses six different operations for the radical cure of
hernia. As Gurlt points