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Updated: May 23, 2025
While, as Gurlt remarks in his "History of Surgery," Arculanus' name is one of those scarcely known he is usually considered just one of many obscure writers of the end of the Middle Ages his writings deserve a better fate. They contain much that is interesting and a great deal that must have been of the highest practical value to his contemporaries.
Three men taught at the University of Montpellier at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, John de Tornamira, Valesco de Taranta, and John Faucon. They cannot be compared, Gurlt says, with Guy de Chauliac, though they were physicians of reputation in their time. Faucon made a compendium of Guy's work for students.
Concerning those "bitten by a rabid dog or those who fear water," Gurlt has quoted the following expression, with regard to which most people will be quite ready to agree with him when he says that it contains a great deal of truth, usually thought to be of much later origin: "When, therefore, any one has been bitten by a rabid dog the treatment of the wound must be undertaken just as soon as possible, even though the bite should be small and only superficial.
His text-book, the "Chirurgia Magna," dedicated to his friend Andrew of Piacenza, was completed at Padua in January, 1252. Gurlt notes that he is the first of the Italian surgeons who quotes, besides the Greeks, the Arabian writers on surgery. Eclecticism had definitely come into vogue to replace exclusive devotion to the Greek authors, and men were taking what was good wherever they found it.
For instance, there are a series of rules on the choice of the nurse, and on the diet and the régime which she should follow if the child is to be properly nourished without disturbance. Probably the most striking passage in her book is that with regard to a torn perineum and its repair. This passage may be found in De Renzi or in Gurlt.
The fine development of surgery that came at the end of the Arabian period of medicine in Europe could never have come from the Arabs themselves. Gurlt has brought this out particularly, but it will not be difficult to cite many other good authorities in support of this opinion.
What I have given here is to be found in a little more than half a page of Gurlt's abstract of the first twenty chapters of Salicet's first book. Altogether Gurlt has more than ten pages of rather small print with regard to William; most of it is as interesting and as practical and as representative of anticipations of what is done in the modern time as what I have here quoted.
He then went to Lyons, where in the course of his practice he attracted so much attention that he was offered the opportunity to teach surgery in Paris. He attracted what Gurlt calls an almost incredible number of scholars to his lessons in Paris, and by hundreds they accompanied him to the bedside of his patients and attended his operations.
Very probably the description quoted by Gurlt of the method of treating fishbones that have become caught in the throat will give the best idea of how thoroughly practical Paul is in his directions. He says: "It will often happen in eating that fishbones or other objects may be swallowed and get caught in some part of the throat.
Complete absence of the inferior maxilla is much rarer in man than in animals. Nicolas and Prenant have described a curious case of this anomaly in a sheep. Gurlt has named subjects presenting the total or partial absence of the inferior maxilla, agnathes or hemiagnathes.
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