medicine, and one of
the scholars of his time. His works are, as we have said, mainly
excerpts from earlier writers and particularly the Arabians, but they
contain enough of hints drawn from his own observation and experience
to make his work of great value.

While, as Gurlt remarks in his "History of Surgery," Arculanus' name is
one of those scarcely known--he is usually considered just one of many
obscure writers of the end of the Middle Ages--his writings deserve a
better fate. They contain much that is interesting and a great deal that
must have been of the highest practical value to his contemporaries.
They attracted wide attention in his own and immediately succeeding
generations. The proof of this is that they exist in a large number of
manuscript copies. Just as soon as printing was introduced his books
appeared in edition after edition. His "Practica" was printed in no less
than seven editions in Venice. Three of them appeared before the end of
the fifteenth century, which places them among the _incunabula_ of
printing.

Probably nothing in the history of human intellectual interest is more
striking than the excellent judgment displayed by the editors who
selected the works to be printed at this time. Very few of them were
trivial or insignificant. Fewer still were idle speculations, and most
of them were almost of classical import for literature and science. Four
editions of this work were printed in Venice in the sixteenth century,
one of them as late as 1560, when the work done by such men as Vesalius,
Columbus, Eustachius, and Fallopius would seem to have made Arculanus
out of date. The dates of the various editions are Venice, 1483, 1493,
1497, 1504, 1542, 1557, and 1560. Besides there was an edition printed
at Basel in 1540.

Arculanus is said to have re-introduced the use of the seton, that is
the method of producing intense counter-irritation by the introduction
of some foreign body into an incision in the skin. We owe to him, too,
according to Pagel in the chapters on medieval medicine in Puschmann's
"Handbook of the History of Medicine," an excellent description of
alcoholic insanity.

His directions for the treatment of conditions in the mouth and nose
apart from the teeth are quite as explicit and practical, and in many
ways quite as great an anticipation of some of our modern notions as
what he has to say with regard to the teeth. For instance, in the
treatment of polyps he says that they shou