hage was the surgeon's greatest and most dreaded bane. Some time
from the fifth to the ninth day a septic ligature came away under
conditions such that inflammatory disturbance had prevented sealing of
the vessel. If the vessel was large, then the hemorrhage was fast and
furious and the patient died in a few minutes. After a surgeon had had a
few deaths of this kind he dreaded the ligature. He abandoned its use
and took kindly to such methods as the actual cautery, red-hot knives
for amputations, and the like, that would sear the surfaces of tissues
and the blood-vessels, and not give rise to secondary hemorrhage. A
little later, however, someone not familiar with secondary risks would
reinvent the ligature. If he were cleanly in his methods and, above all,
if he were doing his work in a new hospital, the ligature worked very
well for a while. If not, it soon fell into innocuous desuetude again.]

[Footnote 9: Puschmann: "Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin," Vol. I,
page 652.]

[Footnote 10: The first dentist who filled teeth with amalgam in New
York, some eighty years ago, had to flee for his life, because of a hue
and cry set up that he was poisoning his patients with mercury.]

[Footnote 11: "Storia de la Scuola di Salerno."]

[Footnote 12: It is probably interesting to note that the word
_universitas_ as used here has no reference to our word university, but
refers to the whole world of students as it were. In the Middle Ages
universities were called _studia generalia_, general studies--that is,
places where everything could be studied and where everyone from any
part of the world could study. Our use of the word university in the
special modern sense of the term comes from the formal mode of address
to the faculty of a university when Popes or rulers sent them
authoritative documents. Such documents began with the expression
_Universitas vestra_, all of you (in the old-time English, as preserved
in the Irish expression, "the whole of ye"), referring to all the
members of the faculty. The transfer to our term and signification
university was not difficult.]

[Footnote 13: Physicians wore a particular garb consisting of a cloak
and often a mask, supposed to protect them from infections at this time,
so that it was not difficult to make a characteristic picture as a sign
for a pharmacy. These symbolic signs were much commoner and very
necessary when people generally were not able to read. It is from that
period