CHAPTER XLI
SURGERY IN GREAT BRITAIN DURING THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
In Great Britain the cultivation of the science of medicine
began at a much later date than it did on the continent
of Europe, and, so far as may be judged from the facts
within our reach, there were, in the early part of the sixteenth
century, very few Englishmen who could justly lay
claim to the possession of more than the rudiments of the
art of surgery. Two centuries earlier, as I have already
stated in a previous chapter, there were three men in England
who gained considerable fame in this department of
medicine. They were Gilbert "the Englishman" (1210),
John of Gaddesden (1320), the author of the famous book
entitled "Rosa Anglica," and John of Ardern (circa 1350);
but afterward, for a period of nearly two hundred years,
the records fail to reveal to us a single surgeon of any note.
Then during the sixteenth century the only English surgeons
whose names deserve to be perpetuated are Gale,
Clowes and Woodall, of whom I shall presently give brief
accounts. They were all at one time or another, as in the
case of the leading continental surgeons of that period,
officially connected with the army. Some idea of the unsatisfactory
state of the medical service in the English army
of that period may be gathered from the statements made
by Gale regarding this matter. From his account it appears
that in 1544 the army was accompanied by a miscellaneous
crowd of men who were supposed to be in some measure
physicians, but who in reality were uneducated quacks,
vendors of all sorts of dressings and washes for wounds,
of infallible cures for gunshot injuries, etc. The mortality
