THE DOCTOR OF PHYSIC
From the Ellesmere MS.
The advance of medicine, as of all the sciences, was slow indeed during the centuries under consideration. In earlier times monks were the only physicians: their modes of cure were principally prayer, holy water, relics, and pilgrimages; but they knew the use of herbs. It was forbidden to ecclesiastics to use fire or knife, in other words, to practise surgery, but they treated wounds. They set broken limbs, and on occasion they let blood. They set up everywhere houses or hospitals for lepers, and in all the greater monastic foundations there were rooms for cupping and blood-letting. At the medical school of Monte Cassino, the relics of St. Matthew were relied upon far more than the teaching of the professors. Sisterhoods or associations of matrons and elderly women studied and practised obstetrics. Abelard exhorted nuns to learn and practise surgery. Certain Orders undertook different branches of medical work. The Johannists and the brotherhood of St. Mary gave their attention to epidemics and plagues; the brethren of St. Lazarus treated leprosy, smallpox, and fever; the brothers of St. Anthony and the Holy Ghost studied “St. Anthony’s Fire”—dysentery; the Knights Templars studied ophthalmia; the Knights Hospitallers maintained companies of women as nurses.
AN OPERATION
From a MS. in Trinity College, Cambridge.
SURGEON OPERATING ON THE SKULL
From a MS. in Trinity College, Cambridge.
It was because the physician was at first an ecclesiastic that surgery was separated from medicine. When the physician was a professional person living by the profession, he pretended to hold surgery in contempt, and refused to operate at all. Lanfranc, however, insisted that medicine and surgery ought to go together. When Henry V. invaded France in 1415, he took with him thirteen surgeons, viz. Thomas Morstede and twelve assistants. On his second expedition he asked the City of London to send him volunteers as assistants. None were forthcoming, and Thomas Morstede was empowered to impress as many assistants as he might require. By this time the blood-letting and the surgery were entrusted to the barbers, who were forbidden to advertise this part of their work by placing a cup full of blood in the window. For the people for whom a physician was not attainable, there were bone-setters and herbalists, the latter of whom, if not the former, are still with us.