nature, they will undoubtedly agree in according to this admirable author of the fourteenth century a high place of honor in the Temple of Fame. Nicaise, the editor of the most recent version of Guy de Chauliac's treatise, speaks of him as the "founder of didactic surgery." From 1363 A. D., the date of its first publication in manuscript, to 1478, a period of more than one hundred years, Guy's book was universally regarded as the authoritative treatise on surgery. But this branch of medicine, it must not be forgotten, was, at that period of the Middle Ages, held in very small esteem by physicians generally, and therefore it is almost certain that Guy received no encouragement whatever from any outside source. All the greater credit, therefore, is due him for the admirable manner in which he carried on the task which he had set before himself during the last years of his life. Extraordinary as it appears to us to-day, the Montpellier School of Medicine, toward the end of the fifteenth century (that is, only a comparatively short time after Guy's death), issued a decree that thereafter their pupils were not to study nor to practice surgery. From this and other well-authenticated facts it appears that the prejudice which existed at that period among physicians against surgery, was strong enough to render them blind to the reality that it was through the instrumentality of this very branch of medical activity that the school at Montpellier had gained such an increase in celebrity. They were unable to dispossess their minds of the idea that operative and all other surgical procedures were derogatory to the dignity of the educated physician.
Guy de Chauliac wrote his treatise originally in Latin—not the Latin of the classical authors, but a Latin greatly deformed by the introduction of French, Arabic and Provençal terms—barbaric Latin, as it is often called. This language was commonly employed at the University of Montpellier and at all other universities at that period; but, as Nicaise states, the style of his writing is so concise, and at the same time so intelligible, that it would scarcely be possible to translate it into modern French without the
