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Among the literary monuments of early English medicine the "Compendium Medicinae" of Gilbertus Anglicus merits a prominent position as the earliest complete treatise on general medicine by an English author which has been preserved to our day, and equally because it forms in itself a very complete mirror of the medical science of its age and its country.

In what follows pains are taken to present the facts in the form in which one comes to know them through van Helmont's own account, given in his Ortus Medicinae. For reasons which need not be described here, van Helmont studied with particular interest the various modifications in which carbon is capable of occurring in nature among them carbon's combustion product, carbon dioxide.

He had early resolved that the boy should follow his own honourable profession, and Peter Blood, being quick to learn and oddly greedy of knowledge, had satisfied his parent by receiving at the age of twenty the degree of baccalaureus medicinae at Trinity College, Dublin. His father survived that satisfaction by three months only. His mother had then been dead some years already.

He became a popular god, not only healing men when alive, but taking good care of them in the journeys after death. The facts about this medicinae primus inventor, as he has been called, may be gathered from Kurt Sethe's study. He seems to have corresponded very much to the Greek Asklepios. As a god he is met with comparatively late, between 700 and 332 B.C. Numerous bronze figures of him remain.

He was familiar with the works both of the Greeks and of the Arabs, and it was largely through his translations that the works of Rhazes and Avicenna became known in the West. One work above all others spread the fame of the school the Regimen Sanitatis, or Flos Medicinae as it is sometimes called, a poem on popular medicine.

Pansier also furnishes us with a list of the chancellors of Montpellier, which contains the name of a certain "Gillibertus," chancellor of the university in 1250. He could find, however, no evidence that this Gillibertus was Gilbertus Anglicus, author of the Compendium Medicinae.

Richard Lee's books were, Wing's Art of Surveying, Scholastical History, Greek Grammar, Caesaris Comentarii, Praxis Medicinae, Hesoid, Tulley's Orations, Virgil, Ovid, Livius, Diogenes, Sallust, History of the World, Warrs of Italy, etc.

It was a general remark of the Faculty, and old Doctor Kittredge, who had come down on purpose to hear Mr. Langdon, heartily agreed to it, that there had never been a diploma filled up, since the institution which conferred upon him the degree of Doctor Medicinae was founded, which carried with it more of promise to the profession than that which bore the name of Bernardus Caryl Langdon Mr.

The Philosophus per ignem, Toparcha in Merode, Royenborch, as he is styled in certain of his writings, is not an easy man to tackle. I show the title-page of the "Ortus Medicinae," the collection of his works by his son. As with the pages of Paracelsus, there are many gems to be dug out.

Finally, I may suggest another line of argument, which, so far as I know, has not yet been advanced for the determination of the period of Gilbert. The Compendium Medicinae of Gilbert is, of course, a compendium of internal medicine. But the book is also something more.