Surgical Education in the Middle Ages

Abstract

The new surgical texts of the thirteenth century suggest that their authors wished their subject to appear as a learned discipline, yet it was still communicated by individual practitioners privately to one or two disciples, not in a university setting. But by 1300, surgery was beginning to be taught formally as part of medicine in many Italian studia, for example, by Dino del Garbo at Siena, though Henri de Mondeville´s programme to accomplish the same at Paris (1306-16) was unsuccessful. Surgery continued to be taught in Italian schools in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though it was of much lower status than medicine, as is revealed at Bologna and Padua; during the same period, surgeons in Paris eventually achieved a limited association with the faculty of medicine there. Dissections and models were perhaps used in university teaching of surgery, which nevertheless appears to have been primarily text-based.