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).