7. Surgeons grew in respect in Italy and France
Italy’s University of Padua gradually expanded its training of surgeons, including the performance of autopsies and dissections of cadavers in the twelfth and thirteenth century. It required its students to study not only anatomy, but diseases and general health. The language of medicine was Latin, meaning students needed to be well-versed in that language, and many of them also resorted to texts in the original Greek. Thus surgeons were among the most well-educated of the time. One such surgeon, who studied in both France and Italy (at Bologna) was Guy de Chauliac. The Frenchman wrote one of the most respected and widely-read texts on the practice of surgery during the thirteenth century, though there is no evidence that he ever performed surgery himself. Written in Latin it was eventually translated into other languages.
In his text, de Chauliac lamented that surgery had been transferred into the hands of “mechanics”. He insisted that those who practiced surgery must first be trained in all forms of medicine, including, “air and food and drink and the like since these are the causes of all health and illness”. De Chauliac referred to surgery as a practice of last resort when treating illness, claiming that a surgeon, “must know how to regulate diet and drugs, because without them surgery, medicine’s third tool, cannot be brought to perfection”. Guy de Chauliac was a leader in the conversion of the practice of surgery, and all medicine, from a craft to a science based on texts and training created by its practitioners.