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Updated: June 8, 2025
Of the astral influence which was considered to have originated the "Great Mortality," physicians and learned men were as completely convinced as of the fact of its reality. A grand conjunction of the three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign of Aquarius, which took place, according to Guy de Chauliac, on the 24th of March, 1345, was generally received as its principal cause.
That Guy de Chauliac was no narrow specialist is abundantly evident from his book, for while the "Great Surgery" treats of the science and art of surgery as its principal subject, there are remarks about nearly everything else relating to medicine, and most of them show a deep interest, a thorough familiarity, and an excellent judgment.
He evidently knew of the many methods suggested before his time of removing teeth without recourse to instrumental extraction. There were a number of applications to the gums that were claimed by older authors to remove the teeth without the need of metal instruments. We might expect that Chauliac would detect the fallacy with regard to these and expose it.
In the chapter on John of Arcoli and Medieval Dentistry we call attention to the fact that Chauliac discussed dental surgery briefly, yet with such practical detail as to show very clearly how much more was known about this specialty in his time than we have had any idea of until recent years.
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.
His care in the selection of patients may be appreciated from his treatment of John of Luxembourg, King of Bavaria, blind from cataract, who consulted Chauliac in 1336 while on a visit to Avignon with the King of France. Chauliac refused to operate, however, and put off the King with dietary regulations.
For English-speaking people an added interest in Guy de Chauliac will be the fact that one of his teachers at Montpellier was Bernard Gordon, very probably a Scotchman, who taught for some thirty-five years at this famous university in the south of France, and died near the end of the first quarter of the fourteenth century.
We are like infants, clinging to the neck of a giant; for we can see all the giant sees and a little more." One of the most interesting features of the history of Guy de Chauliac is the bibliography of his works which has been written by Nicaise. This is admirably complete, labored over with the devotion that characterized Nicaise's attitude of unstinted admiration for the subject.
It is not hard to understand that such an independent thinker as Chauliac should have been utterly dissatisfied with a book that did not go beyond the forefathers in medicine that the author quotes.
In Roth's life of Vesalius, which is usually considered one of our most authoritative medical historical works not only with regard to the details of Vesalius' life, but also in all that concerns anatomy about that time and for some centuries before, there is a passage quoted from Chauliac himself which shows how freely dissection was practised at the Italian universities in the fourteenth century.
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