Guy de Chauliac

Guy de Chauliac, also called Guido or Guigo de Cauliaco, was a French physician and surgeon who lived from about 1300 until 1368. Born into a family of modest means in Chaulhac in the Lozere, he began his medical studies at Toulouse and went on to Montpellier, then the centre of medical knowledge in fourteenth-century France, and became a Master of Medicine and Surgery around 1325 before travelling to Bologna to study anatomy under Nicola Bertuccio. He was invited to the papal court at Avignon and served as personal physician to Pope Clement VI, Pope Innocent VI and Pope Urban V. When the Black Death reached Avignon in 1348 and physicians fled the city, he stayed, treated plague patients and recorded their symptoms closely, distinguishing the bubonic and pneumonic forms of the disease. He wrote a lengthy treatise on surgery in Latin, the Chirurgia magna, in seven volumes covering anatomy, bloodletting, cauterization, drugs, wounds, fractures and ulcers; it was translated into many languages, including Middle English, and widely read by physicians in late medieval Europe.