Guy De Chauliac

Guy de Chauliac was born around 1300 in the village of Chaulhac in the Auvergne region of central France, into a peasant family whose education was supported by the local seigneurs. He took minor clerical orders and studied medicine at the University of Toulouse and then at Montpellier, the leading medical school of the medieval Latin West, where he received his master's degree in medicine around 1325. He completed further anatomical study at Bologna under the surgeon Niccolò Bertuccio.

He practised in Lyon for several years before being appointed personal physician to Pope Clement VI at the papal court in Avignon, a post he retained under Clement's successors Innocent VI and Urban V. He held a canonry at Reims and at Mende and lived comfortably as a senior cleric-physician at one of the wealthiest courts of fourteenth-century Europe.

The Black Death reached Avignon in early 1348 and killed roughly half the city's inhabitants. He stayed at his post, treated the pope and his household, contracted the disease himself, and recovered. His later writings give one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the plague's clinical course, distinguishing the bubonic and pneumonic forms and recording the public-health measures Clement VI took, including isolating the pope behind two great fires and the consecration of the Rhône for mass burial.

He completed his great surgical compendium Inventarium sive chirurgia magna, usually known as Chirurgia Magna, on July 7, 1363. The seven-book treatise covered anatomy, wounds, fractures, ulcers, and special diseases, drew on more than a hundred earlier authors, and remained the standard surgical textbook in Europe for at least two centuries, translated into French, Provençal, Italian, English, Dutch, and Hebrew. He died around July 1368 in Avignon or Lyon.

The name Guy comes from the Old French rendering of a Germanic root wid ("wood") or possibly witu, brought into Latin as Wido and Guido. He carried it as a masculine given name common in medieval France.