tion.
When read it proves to forbid the cutting up of bodies to carry them to
a distance for burial, an abuse which caused the spread of disease, and
was properly prohibited. The Church prohibition was international and
therefore effective. At the time the bull was issued there were twenty
medical schools doing dissection in Italy and they continued to practise
it quite undisturbed during succeeding centuries. The Papal physicians
were among the greatest dissectors. Dissections were done at Rome and
the cardinals attended them. Bologna at the height of its fame was in
the Papal States. All this has been ignored and the supposed bull
against anatomy emphasized as representing the keynote of medical and
surgical history. Then there was a Papal decree forbidding the making of
gold and silver. This was said to forbid chemistry or alchemy and so
prevent scientific progress. The history of the medical schools of the
time shows that it did no such thing. The great alchemists of the time
doing really scientific work were all clergymen, many of them very
prominent ecclesiastics.

Just in the same way there were said to be decrees of the Church
councils forbidding the practice of surgery. President White says in his
"Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," that, as a
consequence of these, surgery was in dishonor until the Emperor
Wenceslaus, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, ordered that it
should be restored to estimation. As a matter of fact, during the two
centuries immediately preceding the first years of the fifteenth
century, surgery developed very wonderfully, and we have probably the
most successful period in all the history of surgery except possibly our
own. The decrees forbade monks to practise surgery because it led to
certain abuses. Those who found these decrees and wanted to believe
that they prevented all surgical development simply quoted them and
assumed there was no surgery. The history of surgery at this time is one
of the most wonderful chapters in human progress.

The more we know of the Middle Ages the more do we realize how much they
accomplished in every department of intellectual effort. Their
development of the arts and crafts has never been equalled in the modern
time. They made very great literature, marvellous architecture,
sculpture that rivals the Greeks', painting that is still the model for
our artists, surpassing illuminations; everything that they touched
became so beautifu