effrontery to request permission of the authorities to exhibit his method before the Medical Faculty of Paris. His request, however, was granted, and he was allowed to operate on a man, forty years old, at Hôtel-Dieu. He performed the operation before a large assembly of physicians, and, after the stone had been successfully extracted, the patient made a prompt recovery. A short time afterward he operated upon another patient at Fontainebleau in the presence of several physicians, one of whom was Monsieur Félix, the First Surgeon of the King, Louis the Fourteenth. In this case also, as well as in several later cases, Frère Jacques was entirely successful, and he now began to be treated by the public with marked consideration. But, in a short time, owing to the jealousy exhibited by a large clique of Paris surgeons, who were encouraged to pursue this course by Mery, the Head Surgeon of Hôtel-Dieu, Frère Jacques was finally forced to leave Paris. I cannot follow him on his further wanderings throughout Europe, from the leading cities of Holland, Belgium and Switzerland to Vienna and Rome. In 1716 he retired to Besançon and lived there quietly up to the time of his death in 1719. But even then his enemies—men to whom he had never done the slightest harm—did their best to destroy the last traces of his existence. A visit made to Besançon by one of his acquaintances not long after our Franciscan monk's death, revealed the fact that his name had been erased from the church registry of deaths. The lateral method of operating for stone, which had been revived and thoroughly developed by him, still finds favor among the best surgeons of our own day; and the names of those mean-spirited men who tried so hard to injure him have long since passed into complete oblivion.
(b) Frère Jean de Saint-Côme,—or Brother John of Saint Cosmas,—whose real name was Jean Baseilhac, was born in 1703 at Poyestruc, Department of Hautes-Pyrenées, France. He received his instruction in the principles of medicine from his father and his grandfather, both of whom were regularly enrolled Masters in Surgery. In 1722, when there could no longer be any doubt about young
