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Updated: June 12, 2025
He wrote a very clear account of the epidemic, which leaves no doubt that it was true bubonic plague. After this fine example, Chauliac's advice to brother physicians in the specialty of surgery carried added weight. In the Introductory chapter of his "Chirurgia Magna" he said: "The surgeon should be learned, skilled, ingenious, and of good morals.
Ordinarily we are not apt to think of the early fourteenth century as an especially productive period in human history, but such it is. Dante's Divine Comedy was entirely written during Chauliac's life. Petrarch was born within a few years of Chauliac himself; Boccaccio in Italy, and Chaucer in England, wrote while Chauliac was still alive.
In the light of Chauliac's life it is indeed amusing to read the excursions of certain historians into the relationship of the Popes and the Church to science during the Middle Ages.
The surgeons of Guy de Chauliac's time would indeed find hospitals wherever they might be called in consultation, even in small towns. They were more numerous in proportion to population than our own and, as a rule, at least as well organized as ours were until the last few years. It is no wonder that with such a good hospital organization excellent surgery was accomplished.
It is an honorable distinction for the medicine of the later fourteenth, the fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries that Guy de Chauliac's book was the most read volume of the time in medicine. Evidently the career of such a man is of import, not alone to physicians, but to all who are interested in the history of education.
Ackermann said that Guy de Chauliac's text-book will take the place of all that has been written on the subject down to his time, so that even if all the other works had been lost his would replace them.
A new sponge is soaked by them in these juices and left to dry in the sun; and when they have need of it they put this sponge into warm water and then hold it under the nostrils of the patient until he goes to sleep. Then they perform the operation." Many people might be prone to think that the hospitals of Chauliac's time would not be suitable for such surgical work as he describes.
Chauliac's book is confessedly a compilation. Indeed it is the critical judgment displayed by Chauliac in selecting from his predecessors that best illustrates at once the practical character of his intellect and his discerning spirit. What the men of his time are said to have lacked is the critical faculty.
We have already quoted the distinguished words of praise accorded him by Pope Clement VI. That they were well deserved, Chauliac's conduct during the black death which ravaged Avignon in 1348, shortly after his arrival in the Papal City, would have been sufficient of itself to attest.
Guy de Chauliac's review of the dentistry of his time and the state of the specialty, as pictured by John of Arcoli, is likely to be particularly interesting, because if there is any department of medical practice that we are sure is comparatively recent in origin, it is dentistry.
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