Henri de Mondeville

Henri de Mondeville was a medieval French surgeon who lived from about 1260 to 1320 and was the first Frenchman to write a surgical treatise. He studied medicine at Montpellier and Paris, then went to Bologna as a cleric-physician to work with the surgeon Theodoric Borgognoni, whose method of dressing wounds ran against the practice of the day. Back in France he taught anatomy and surgery at Montpellier from 1301 to 1304, served as royal surgeon to Philip the Fair and kept the post under Louis X, and later taught in Paris. From 1306 he worked on the Latin manuscript La Chirurgie, which he never finished and which was rediscovered by Julius Leopold Pagel in 1892. It argued for keeping wounds clean without encouraging pus, and he is credited with a human dissection at Montpellier in 1315.