Guy de Chauliac studied medicine and surgery in Montpellier and Paris, and served as the personal physician to Popes Clement VI, Innocent VI and Urban V. His Chirurgia magna, written in the early 1360s, remained a standard surgical text up to the time of Ambroise Paré. The work was a compilation of the best medical ideas of the time, containing very little original material and drawing heavily upon the classical Greek and Arabic medical writings; however, Guy often used his own experience as a basis for criticism of those canonical texts.

The book’s seven chapters cover a broad range of subjects, from cancers to wounds to dentistry. Of particular interest is Guy’s insistence that surgeons study anatomy (“the surgeon who is ignorant of anatomy carves the human body as a blind man carves wood”), and his description, in his chapter on abscesses and tumors, of the Avignon plagues of 1348 and 1360, which he blamed upon the Jews and an evil conjunction of the planets. The book’s preface (“Capitulum singulare”) is an essay on the general facts that Guy thought all surgeons should know, including the liberal arts, diet, surgical instruments and operating methods; it also contains a brief history of medicine in the form of notes on earlier physicians and surgeons

Guy distinguished the various kinds of hernia from varicocele, hydrocele, and sarcocele, and described an operation for the radical cure of hernia. His book includes Guy’s views on fractures, and gives an excellent summary of the dentistry of that period. Guy discussed the anatomy of the teeth and their eruption. He also listed the maladies to which the teeth are subject, and their cures, including hygienic rules which for the most part remain true today. He described the double-lever pelican and its method of use. He also recorded how surgeons were using botanic medicines to prevent their patients from feeling pain during operations.

The first edition of 1478 was the first important medical book printed in French. ISTC no. ig00560700.  This edition is extremely rare; the ISTC cites only two copies, both in Paris: Paris BnF; Moulins BM (imperfect, fragment).

This late 15th century edition of the surgery of Guy de Chauliac also contained the first printed editions of various lesser-known medieval surgeries such as those by Bruno da Longoburgo and Leonardo Bertapaglia. It also also contained Recepta aque balnei de Porrecta by Bonventura Castelli. ISTC No. ig00558000. 

Digital facsimile from Biblioteca de Andalucía at this link.

The surgical section of Albucasis’s Altasrif, the first rational, complete and illustrated treatise on surgery and surgical instruments. The author was an  Arab Muslim physician and surgeon who lived in Al-Andalus. During the Middle Ages this was the leading textbook on surgery until it was superseded by Saliceto. The work was first published in print in the Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona, in this collective edition, in which Guy de Chauliac's surgery was the lead title. Besides its significance in general surgery and for the history of surgical instruments, Albucasis's work was “of great importance for the development of practical dentistry” (Hoffmann-Axthelm). Chapter 28 discusses excision of epulis. Chapter 29 deals with calculus. Albucasis understood that calculus on the teeth is a major cause of periodontal disease and gave explicit instructions for scaling the teeth, describing the instruments which he invented for this purpose. Chapter 30 covers tooth extraction, and Chapter 33 contains one of the earliest discussions of tooth prostheses, and describes some oral surgery procedures. The work contains some of the earliest illustrations of dental instruments. See No. 5550.  

Note that Albucasis's surgery, a work of significant practical value, was the last, or one of the last, of the medieval classics of surgery to be printed. ISTC no. ig00564000. Digital facsimile from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek at this link.  

A superbly illustrated 14th century MS of Albucasis was reproduced in full color facsimile as Codex Vindobonensis Series Nova 2641, Graz, Akademische Druck, 1979.

The standard edition in French includes a very extensive bibliography of both manuscript and printed versions. English translation of sections on wounds and fractures, Chicago, 1923.

Middle English text of Guy de Chauliac's surgery.

Definitive edition of the medieval Latin text of Guy's Surgery from MS Vat. Palat. Lat. 1317, completed in Montpellier in 1373, only a decade after the text is thought to have been completed. The editors traced the more than 3000 references to older medical authorities in this encyclopedic work to their sources and discussed their use.