Penza State University». Medical Institute. Department: History of Medicine. Course paper Assignment. In the discipline… History of medicine…. BIOGRAPHY   1

The French surgeon Guy de Chauliac (ca. 1295-1368), also known as Guido de Cauliaco, was the most famous surgical writer of the Middle Ages. His major work remained the principal didactic text on surgery until the 18th century.

Guy de Chauliac was born, very likely, at Chauliac, a village near the southern border of Auvergne. He was probably of peasant stock. The little that is known of his childhood and early training stems from brief, but frequent, autobiographical comments in his writings.

Because Guy cited the views of one of his Toulousian teachers, he is believed to have begun his medical and surgical studies in that city. At the University of Montpellier, whose medical faculty was renowned throughout the medieval world, he fulfilled the requirements for the degree of master of medicine. Subsequently, that title accompanied his name in most official documents, even though he had previously taken holy orders.

Sometime after 1326 Chauliac attended the anatomical lectures of Nicolò Bertuccio, the student of and successor to the important medieval anatomist Mondino da Luzzi at the University of Bologna. The next trace of Chauliac is in Paris, where during the late 13th century great surgeons such as Lanfranc and Henri de Mondeville had taught and practiced. The courses that their followers offered may have piqued but did not hold Chauliac's interest, for unlike many students, he did not linger in Paris but seems to have drifted slowly southward, perhaps performing surgical procedures to earn his way.

After having practiced surgery in or near Lyons for a decade or more, Chauliac moved to Avignon, where he accepted the post of private physician to Pope Clement VI. The date of his appointment to his office can be fixed between the Pope's election in 1342 and the onset of the bubonic plague epidemic at Avignon in 1348, which Chauliac described as a resident physician in that city. He also served Clement's successors at Avignon, Innocent VI and Urban V. In 1363 Chauliac, who had become papal first physician, composed his most important work, The Inventory of Medicine, or as it is known in Latin, Chirurgia magna.

This book, though not the earliest medieval surgical text, is remarkable in several respects. It begins with a historical account of the development of medicine and incorporates Chauliac's evaluation of the medical sources available in the mid-14th century. He reveals that he prized the Galenic texts recently rendered from Greek to Latin but scorned John of Gaddesden's medical encyclopedia, Rosa Anglica.

Of more interest today, however, are the personal experiences that Chauliac sprinkled throughout his text. These findings, together with his efforts to reconcile them with authoritative statements, contributed to the enormous success of his book; the Chirurgia magna was translated into many languages and passed through innumerable editions and abridgments. Five years after completing it, probably during the month of July, in 1368, Chauliac died.

WHAT IS THE BLACK DEATH?

The Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague, a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that circulates among wild rodents where they live in great numbers and density. Such an area is called a ‘plague focus’ or a ‘plague reservoir’. Plague among humans arises when rodents in human habitation, normally black rats, become infected. The black rat, also called the ‘house rat’ and the ‘ship rat’, likes to live close to people, the very quality that makes it dangerous (in contrast, the brown or grey rat prefers to keep its distance in sewers and cellars). Normally, it takes ten to fourteen days before plague has killed off most of a contaminated rat colony, making it difficult for great numbers of fleas gathered on the remaining, but soon- dying, rats to find new hosts. After three days of fasting, hungry rat fleas turn on humans. From the bite site, the contagion drains to a lymph node that consequently swells to form a painful bubo, most often in the groin, on the thigh, in an armpit or on the neck. Hence the name bubonic plague. The infection takes three–five days to incubate in people before they fall ill, and another three–five days before, in 80 per cent of the cases, the victims die. Thus, from the introduction of plague contagion among rats in a human community it takes, on average, twenty-three days before the first person dies.

Origin and Spread

When the plague hit in the mid-1300s, no one knew what caused this dreadful pestilence. Some took it as divine punishment for the world’s wicked ways, possibly the end of the world. Others blamed Jews, foreigners, travelers, and lepers, who were shunned and turned away where once they had been welcomed or at least accepted. Some towns barricaded themselves in, afraid to let anyone in who was not already there and equally afraid to let anyone out. Mothers abandoned husbands and children—and vice versa—for fear of catching the contagion. Few other than those in religious orders dared to nurse the sick. Sometimes houses were burned to the ground with the inhabitants inside if they were known to be ill. Ordinary parish burial grounds were insufficient to hold the massive numbers of dead, and new plague cemeteries were opened.

The social and economic havoc created by the plague was almost beyond imagining, yet it is now being paralleled in many ways by the impact of the Ebola virus epidemic. Whole villages die within a few weeks, and fear spreads even faster than the infectious agent.

With hindsight, the pandemic can be traced to the Mongol Empire, which in addition to conquering with its vast army enormous areas of Asia, opened and ensured the safety of the Silk Road for trade. This Pax Mongolica facilitated relatively rapid, long-distance transport, both of people and diseases, as airplanes and railroads do today with sufferers of the Ebola virus. Where travel is highly restricted and populations are small, deadly diseases tend to burn themselves out fairly quickly. But where the disease can be spread easily to new areas, with a new supply of victims, efforts to contain such pandemics are far more difficult.

DeWitte’s results do not agree with several documentary studies of population well-being during this time, such as one based on wills by Jens Röhrkasten of University of Birmingham in England. These documents showed spikes in mortality associated with plague epidemics in 1361, 1368, 1375, 1382, and 1390. However, wills and other documents tend to provide evidence only on well-to-do men, excluding married or unmarried women, children, servants, apprentices, laborers, and paupers. The sheer number of wills recorded in various counties amply demonstrates the appalling wave of death, but Röhrkasten’s data give only part of the story of the aftermath of the plague.

What does he do with Black Death Disease?