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THE MEDICAL PROFESSION.
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materia medica, and many other subjects. Unfortunately,
at this period also, petty jealousies and quarrels continued
to exist between the surgical faculty, as the College de St.
C6me may be called, and the medical faculty, to the injury
of science in general. The doctors gave themselves pains
to provide the surgeons with opponents endowed with
privileges equal to their, own, in the so-called barber-
surgeons: they, with this object, took care that the latter
should acquire a larger amount of general and technical
knowledge. Although this led to many unsatisfactory
occurrences between the two classes of practitioners it
had yet this good effect that the possibility was afforded to
highly-gifted members of the inferior class of surgeons
of becoming operating surgeons in our sense of the
words. The example of an AMBROISE PARE shows how
much surgery and with it medicine in general owes to this
circumstance. It is only fair to say that the members of
the faculty of medicine in their procedure had not this
laudable end in view but washed rather to lower the credit
of surgery and make its representatives their humble
servants, willing to recognize their own intellectual superi­
ority. This way of looking at the subject is clearly indi­
cated by the words of M. SERVIN who wrote in 1607,
"que la science n'est pour ceux qui n'ont que la main,
qu'ils doivent laisser a juger aux mddecins."* When one
of the professors, ROBERT LE SECQ, in an examination of
surgeons in the year 1606, alluded to physiology and
entered upon the subject of the action of the muscles, the
mechanism of respiration and many other matters, the
faculty of medicine entered a protest, on the ground that
these things were points of controversy in science.f In
Germany and other countries surgery seldom raised itself
above a handicraft. It was only taught at some univer­
sities/' At Vienna, a Professor of Surgery was appointed
with the annual stipend of 52 florins.J The German
* D. PUYLON : Statuts de la faculte' de me'decine, Paris 1672.
t HAZON op. cit. X ROSAS op. tit. ii, 51.
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