Paris for three years, but was forced to leave before being granted a
medical degree, as we shall see.
Prior to the arrival of Andreas Vesalius to the City of Light, barbers,
surgeons, and physicians continued to wrangle for prestige and
recognition. The longstanding prohibition against human dissection had
contributed to physicians’ disinterest in anatomical study of any kind.
Because the study of anatomy was so strongly linked to surgery, there was
little incentive for physicians to engage in serious scholarship of the body
and certainly not to touch a corpse. Modern readers understand that today,
all physicians and surgeons, whatever their specialty, started out as
classmates in the same medical schools. But in medieval times, physicians
and surgeons did not train together. The guild of surgeons trained
independently from the faculty of medicine; the barbers were far below,
with no schooling in Latin (and certainly not in Greek), and only
occasionally benefitting from instruction by physicians and surgeons.
Barbers first organized around monasteries, where they performed the
tonsure haircut we associate with medieval monks; over the preceding
millennium, barbers became expert with knives while providing haircuts,
shaves, and Hippocratic bloodletting. In England, the barbers melded with
surgeons from 1540 to 1745, eventually becoming irrelevant except for a
shave and a haircut. The striped barber pole is the only reminder of their
former job as bleeding patrons.
Like medieval priests exercising control over parishioners, “the
employment of Latin seems to have been in the ancient tradition of power
and control ... through its possession of the keys to the esoteric
mysteries.”^19 After years of simmering tensions, an agreement was finally
reached in Paris in 1516 that resolved the medical hierarchy, with
physicians preserving their vaunted position and surgeons accepting a
subservient station. Instead of the Parisians emulating the more advanced
Bolognese and Paduans, who rolled up their sleeves, dissecting and
investigating for themselves, the French physicians eschewed touching
cadavers, instead lecturing high from their cathedra (high chair) while the
surgeon performed the actual dissection.
Whereas surgery had achieved some measure of respect in Italian cities
by the 1400s, in Northern European countries like France, Germany, and
England, esteem for surgeons languished far behind that enjoyed by
physicians. Guilds (like modern-day trade unions) were formed by both