ntains a lot of suggestive material. He was quoting mainly the Arabian
authors, and especially Abulcasis and Ali Abbas and Rhazes, and these of
course, as we have said, mentioned many methods of artificially
replacing teeth as also of transplantation and of treatment of the
deformities of the dental arches.

On the whole, however, it must be confessed that we have here in the
middle of the fourteenth century a rather surprising anticipation of the
knowledge of a special department of medicine which is usually
considered to be distinctly modern, and indeed as having only attracted
attention seriously in comparatively recent times.

After Guy de Chauliac the next important contributor to dentistry is
Giovanni of Arcoli, often better known by his Latin name, Johannes
Arculanus, who was a professor of medicine and surgery at Bologna and
afterwards at Padua, just before and after the middle of the fifteenth
century, and who died in 1484. He is famous principally for being the
first we know who mentions the filling of teeth with gold.

It might possibly be suggested that coming at this time Arculanus should
rather be reckoned as a Maker of Medicine in the Renaissance than as
belonging to the Middle Ages and its influences. His education, however,
was entirely completed before the earliest date at which the Renaissance
movement is usually said to begin, that is with the fall of
Constantinople in 1452, and he was dead before the other date, that of
the discovery of America in 1492, which the Germans have in recent years
come to set down as the end of the Middle Ages. Besides, what he has to
say about dentistry occurs in typical medieval form. It is found in a
commentary on Rhazes, written just about the middle of the fifteenth
century. In the later true Renaissance such a commentary would have been
on a Greek author. In his commentary Arculanus touches on most of the
features of medicine and surgery from the standpoint of his own
experience as well as from what he knows of the writings of his
predecessors and contemporaries. With the rest he has a series of
chapters on diseases of the teeth. Guerini in his "History of Dentistry"
says that "this subject [dentistry] is treated rather fully, and with
great accuracy." Even some short references to it will, I think,
demonstrate this rather readily.[29]

Arculanus is particularly full in his directions for the preservation of
the teeth. We are rather prone to think that prophylaxi