A practical treatise on the diseases of women / by T. Gaillard Thomas.

  • Thomas, T. Gaillard (Theodore Gaillard), 1832-1903.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of women / by T. Gaillard Thomas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    At once they became lovers and zealous cultivators of learning. The physicians of Alexandria were greeted by them as instructors, and from the seed thus planted sprang up the Arabian School! With other information, of course, they gained that pertaining to gynecology, but, the Mohammedan laws forbidding the examination of women by one of the opposite sex, the study languished in their hands; and although Rhazes, Avicenna, and their successors copied from Greek writers upon it, a want of zeal, due to want of personal observation and experience, allowed a retrograde movement to occur whicb left the subject enveloped in darkness for centuries afterwards. Albucasis, one of the last of this school, flourished at the end of the eleventh century, and after him, although from time to time writers of greater or less merit on diseases peculiar to women appeared, nothing worthy of special note occurs, except the occasional allusion to the speculum, which had evidently fallen almost entirely into disuse. We have then sufficient data to warrant the belief that the phy- sicians who flourished from the foundation of the Greek School of Medicine, 400 years before Christ, to the dispersion of the Alex- andrian School by the Saracens, 640 years after Christ, were well informed in gynecology, and were familiar with means of investi- gation which were subsequently lost, or ceased to be appreciated. They fully sustain the statement of the English translator of the works of Hippocrates that, They furnish the most indubitable proof that the obstetrical art had been cultivated with most extraordinary ability at an early period. It must not, however, be supposed that the knowledge of the ancients was of the same exact and scientific nature as that whicb has prevailed since the modern introduction of the speculum. lie who seeks in this literature for distinct and lucid pathological data will surely meet with disappointment. They did not sufliciently separate inflammations of the puerperal and non-puerperal uterus, confounded affections of that organ with those of the pelvic areolar tissue, and made no distinctions between diseases of the mucous membrane and parenchyma, nor the morbid states of the neck and body. Among their remedies were numerous articles which to-day we regard as inert or even injurious—as pigeon's dung, woman's milk,stag's marrow, etc.; and Aetius and Paulus seem to have been as partial to the grease of geese as our Milesian population is at present. To make amends for this many a valuable and sug- gestive thought may be gleaned with reference to diagnosis and treatment. This has certainly been proved by our experience of