This paper suggests that coded hand signals provided early university scholars with an important non-verbal means of communication too. Using illustrations of classroom scenes from early university manuscripts, this paper analyzes the artistic conventions for representing gestures that these images embody. By building up a typology of these gesticulations, it demonstrates that the producers of these images and their audience shared a perception of scholastic education that embraced a sophisticated understanding of the activities associated with university education. Michael Mc Vaugh. Surgical Education in the Middle Ages.
Surgery becomes text-based.
Inserting surgery into medical faculties, c. 1300. The second-class status of academic surgery in the later Middle Ages. Techniques of university surgical instruction. The new surgical texts of the thirteenth century suggest that their authors wished their subject to appear as a learned discipline, yet it was still communicated by individual practitioners privately to one or two disciples, not in a university setting. Dissections and models were perhaps used in university teaching of surgery, which nevertheless appears to have been primarily text-based.