Presidential address on the influence of social and legal restrictions on medical practice / by John Tweedy.

  • Tweedy, John, 1849-1924.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Presidential address on the influence of social and legal restrictions on medical practice / by John Tweedy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Parenthetically, I may observe that the King probably suffered from sympathetic ophthalmia, an affection still incurable, at any rate in its more severe forms. Roland of Parma, who flourished in the middle of the thirteenth century, records in his Chirurgia the precautions he deemed it prudent to take before venturing to operate on a case of traumatic hernia of the lung. The most skilful surgeons of Bologna had abandoned the patient to die. Roland, who had been called to the case, obtained permission from the Bishop to operate, and protected himself by guarantees of security from the patient, his lord, and thirty of the friends who assisted at the operation. Notwithstanding the favour of the Bishop, and the guarantees of the patient and his friends, it was, perhaps, fortunate for Roland that the operation had a successful issue. The legal, social, and civil penalties to which surgeons in the Middle Ages were exposed accounts for much of the timidity and reserve of mediaeval surgery. There were, of course, other causes peculiar to the state of surgery at that time, more particularly the ignorance of anatomy, the dread of haemorrhage, and the imperfect means of arresting it, and not least, perhaps, the ^contempt with which practical surgery was looked down upon by clerical physicians of the day, as a mere handicraft beneath the dignity of a learned person. “ 0 God ! ” exclaimed Lanfranc, towards the end of the thirteenth century, “ Why is it that there is now so much difference between a physician and a surgeon, except that physicians have abandoned manual operations to laymen. They say it is because they disdain to work with their hands, but I believe it is because they do not know how to perform operations.” Leopold, Duke of Austria, the captor of Richard Cceur de Lion, had his leg fractured from the kick of a horse. The limb mortified, and amputation was necessary, but no surgeon could be found willing to undertake the operation. At length, unable to bear his pain, the operation was performed by the Duke himself holding an axe to the limb while his Chamberlain struck the axe three blows with a mallet. But the Duke’s sufferings continued, and the inflammation spread to the body. The bishops, seeing him in such a state of misery and suffering, admitted him to the communion of the faithful, “after which,” says Roger of Wendovei', “lie expired in dreadful agony.” The scarcity of surgeons, and their reluctance to undertake the treatment of serious cases in distinguished persons, is exemplified in the case of Mathias Corvin, King of Hungary, who, having been wounded in the arm in a battle with the Turks in the year 1468, let it be known throughout all the countries of Europe that he would liberally reward anyone who would cure him. Many months passed