Montpellier and Paris; and this fact suggests the question, Do these men really represent the best type of physicians who lived in England during the fourteenth century? The great English poet Chaucer, in his "Canterbury Tales" (written at about the same period of time), furnishes us with a portrait of a man who appears to have been well informed with regard to the earlier Greek and Arabian medical authorities as well as with the leading physicians of his own time, and who in addition was clever both in ascertaining the causes and nature of his patients' maladies and in prescribing for them the proper remedies. As this physician's name is not mentioned, we cannot be sure that he was not one of the three to whom reference has just been made. By the description given by the poet, who probably was personally acquainted with the man whose portrait he draws, one is tempted to believe that he was a physician of a higher type than any one of the three named above. Chaucer's account reads as follow:—
There was also a Doctor of Phisik,
In al this worlde was ther non him like
To speke of phisik and of surgerye;.
For he was grounded in astronomye.
He kepte his pacient wondrously and we
In all houres by his magik natural.
Well coude he gesse the ascending of the star
Wherein his patientes fortunes settled were.
He knew the cause of every maladye,
Were it of cold, or hete, or moyst, or drye,
And where they engendered, and of what humour;
He was a very parfit practisour.
The cause once knowen and his right mesúre,
Anon he gaf the syke man his cure.
Ful redy hadde he his apothecaries,
To sende him drugges, and electuaries,
For eche of them made the other for to wynne;
Their friendshipe was not newe to begynne.
Wel knew he the old Esculapius,
And Discorides, and eek Rufus;
Old Ypocras, Haly and Galien;
Serapyon, Razis, and Avycen;
