The first of these volumes offers a text of the last and greatest surgical encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (1363); the second analyzes its construction from earlier sources.
The text itself covers anatomy and the treatment of wounds, ulcers, fractures, dislocations, and a variety of other conditions and diseases, including not just surgical but medical procedures, which it discusses within a broad framework of medical (physiological and pathological) learning. In the commentary volume, the author's more than 3000 references to older medical authorities are traced to their sources and their use is discussed.
Together, the volumes illuminate the culmination of medieval surgery and its techniques in an academic setting and furnish a kind of chrestomathy of the whole range of literature known and cited in medieval medical faculties.

Michael R. McVaugh, Ph.D. (1965) in History (Princeton University) is Wiliam Smith Wells Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. He has published extensively on late medieval medicine, including Medicine Before the Plague (Cambridge, 1993).