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Updated: June 8, 2025
How much greater then must it have been in so terrible a disease, where assistants could not venture to approach the sick without exposing themselves to certain death? Only two medical descriptions of the malady have reached us, the one by the brave Guy de Chauliac, the other by Raymond Chalin de Vinario, a very experienced scholar, who was well versed in the learning of the time.
Most of the surprise with regard to these operations will vanish when it is recalled that in Italy during the thirteenth century, as we have already seen, methods of anæsthesia by means of opium and mandragora were in common use, having been invented in the twelfth century and perfected by Ugo da Lucca, and Chauliac must not only have known but must have frequently employed various methods of anæsthesia.
As noted by Guerini in his "History of Dentistry," the translation of which was published under the auspices of the National Dental Association of the United States of America, Chauliac recognized the dentists as specialists.
Moreover the traditions show that the Da Luccas particularly had invented a method that left very little to be desired in this matter of anæsthesia. A reference to the sketch of Guy de Chauliac in this volume will show how practical the method was in his time.
In a word, we have a picture of the skilled surgeon of the modern time in this treatise of a fourteenth-century teacher of surgery. Chauliac discusses six different operations for the radical cure of hernia. As Gurlt points out, he criticises them from the same standpoint as that of recent surgeons.
The immediate evidence of the value of old-time surgery is to be found in the fact that Guy de Chauliac, who is commonly spoken of in the history of medicine as the Father of Modern Surgery, lived his seventy-odd years of life during the fourteenth century and accomplished the best of his work, therefore, some five centuries before surgery in our modern sense of the term is supposed to have developed.
Chauliac is typically representative of medieval science, a man who gave due weight to authority, yet tried everything by his own experience, and who sums up in himself such wonderful advance in surgery that during the last twenty years the students of the history of medicine have been more interested in him than in anyone who comes during the intervening six centuries.
No wonder that Malgaigne says of him, "Never since Hippocrates has medicine heard such language filled with so much nobility and so full of matter in so few words." Chauliac was in every way worthy of his great contemporaries and the period in which his lot was cast.
After Guy de Chauliac the next important contributor to dentistry is Giovanni of Arcoli, often better known by his Latin name, Johannes Arculanus, who was a professor of medicine and surgery at Bologna and afterwards at Padua, just before and after the middle of the fifteenth century, and who died in 1484.
In fact, though Guy de Chauliac frankly confesses that he touches on the subject of dentistry only in order to complete his presentation of the subject of surgery and not because he has anything of his own to say with regard to the subject, there is much that is of present-day interest in his brief paragraphs.
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