ght. The preceding
century had seen the origin of the universities and the rise of such
supremely great men as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and
the other famous scholars of the early days of the mendicant orders, and
had made the intellectual mould of university training in which men's
minds for seven centuries were to be formed, so that Chauliac, instead
of being an unusual phenomenon is only a fitting expression of the
interest of this time in everything, including the physical sciences
and, above all, medicine and surgery.

For some people it may be a source of surprise that Chauliac should
have had the intellectual training to enable him to accomplish such
judicious work in his specialty. Many people will be apt to assume that
he accomplished what he did in spite of his training, genius succeeding
even in an unfavorable environment, and notwithstanding educational
disadvantages. Those who would be satisfied with any such explanation,
however, know nothing of the educational opportunities provided in the
period of which Chauliac was the fruit. He is a typical university man
of the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the universities must be
given due credit for him. It is ordinarily assumed that the universities
paid very little attention to science and that scientists would find
practically nothing to satisfy in their curricula. Professor Huxley in
his address on "Universities, Actual and Ideal," delivered as the
Rectorial Address at Aberdeen University in 1874, declared that they
were probably educating in the real sense of the word better than we do
now. (See quotation in "The Medical School at Salerno.")

In the light of Chauliac's life it is indeed amusing to read the
excursions of certain historians into the relationship of the Popes and
the Church to science during the Middle Ages. Chauliac is typically
representative of medieval science, a man who gave due weight to
authority, yet tried everything by his own experience, and who sums up
in himself such wonderful advance in surgery that during the last twenty
years the students of the history of medicine have been more interested
in him than in anyone who comes during the intervening six centuries.
Chauliac, however, instead of meeting with any opposition, encountered
encouragement, liberal patronage, generous interest, and even enjoyed
the intimate friendship of the highest ecclesiastics and the Popes of
his time. In every way his life m