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As Roland's edition of Roger's "Chirurgia" is said to have been written in 1264, the comparison of these passages would seem to indicate that Gilbert must have written the Compendium after 1230 and prior to the year 1264.
Nevertheless the major part of these surgical chapters are either literal copies, or very close paraphrases, of the similar chapters of the "Chirurgia" of Roger of Parma, a distinguished professor in Salernum and the pioneer of modern surgery.
Guy de Chauliac, whose teacher in anatomy for some time Mondeville was, says in the first chapter of his "Chirurgia Magna" that pictures do not suffice for the teaching of anatomy and that actual dissection is necessary.
An introduction relative to the pathology of the disease and which seems to be original, is followed by a treatment, medical and surgical, adopted almost literally from the Chirurgia of Roger.
He then settled down to his own life work, carrying his Italian and French masters' teachings well beyond the point where he received them, and after years of personal experience he gathered together his masters' ideas, tested by his own observations, into his "Chirurgia Magna," a great text-book of surgery which sums up the whole subject succinctly, yet completely, for succeeding generations.
He served as chamberlain-physician to three Popes, Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V. We do not know the exact date of his death, but when Pope Urban V went to Rome in 1367, Chauliac was putting the finishing touches on his "Chirurgia Magna," which, as he tells us, was undertaken as a solatium senectutis a solace in old age. When Urban returned to Avignon for a time in 1370 Chauliac was dead.
Singularly the word is not found in the "Chirurgia" of Roger of Parma, from whom Gilbert seems to have borrowed most of his surgical knowledge. Nor is it employed by Roland, Roger's pupil and editor. But in all these writers cataracta seems to be included under the general term pannus, meaning opacities of every kind.
Numerous similar passages, with others in which the text of Gilbert is rather a paraphrase than a copy of the text of Roger, serve to confirm the conclusion that the surgical writings of the English physician are borrowed mainly from the "Chirurgia" of the Italian surgeon.
Freind says this chapter is copied chiefly from Theodorius of Cervia. See page 3 ante. If, however, I am correct in my conjecture that the Compendium was written about the year 1240, the copying must have been done by Theodorius, whose "Chirurgia" did not appear until 1266. Sometimes, too, it occasions a solution of continuity and the loss of members.
Gurlt tells us that Bruno owed much of what he wrote to his own experience and observation. He begins his work by a definition of surgery, chirurgia, tracing it to the Greek and emphasizing that it means handwork. He then declares that it is the last instrument of medicine to be used only when the other two instruments, diet and potions, have failed.
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