Early contributions of anatomy to obstetrics.

  • Barbour, A. H. Freeland (Alexander Hugh Freeland), 1856-1927.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Early contributions of anatomy to obstetrics. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    27/44
    truly artistic productions. Choulant1 says of him:—Himself engaged in art, and associated with artists and the friends of art, he has kept the artistic standpoint in his works. (2.) These two books are further noteworthy as contributions to Obstetrics. The only viscus which he considers worthy of reproduction is the uterus; and in making and publishing his section of it, he forever uprooted and cast out the erroneous teaching of Mondino. The plate represents a female figure standing with a veil behind her, which she holds over her head with the left hand. The abdomen is laid open; the uterus and cervix divided coronally. There is grim humour in representing the subject as holding in her right hand, for purposes of demonstration, the front half of the divided uterus and cervix. The description is as follows:— You have in the belly of this figure the uterus laid open, in which you will see certain black points indicating the heads of the veins, which are called cotyledons. You have, further, the uterus laid open outside the body, on which rests ^he index finger, And in the fundus of the uterus you will see a certain depression indicating a right and left half; but I have not found in the uterus any other division. The black points are the cotyledons, and you will see that the cervix does not possess these. This illustration with descriptive note appears in the Com- mentaries, and is repeated in the Isagoge. The Isagogc gives in addition a plate of the uterus (reproduced in our illustrations) seen from the outside and laid open, with this note:— Because things repeated ten times are wont to please, you have here two uteri, of which the one is turned outside-in, where you will see how, through the whole cavity, there are many black points indicating round cotyledons, which are not present in the neck. In the other figure you will see the natural womb with its testicles and spermatic vessels, and the ligaments with which its horns are bound. You will see also the neck and the os through which menstrual blood and foetus pass and the semen enters. Passing from the work of Berengario we come to the three other great contributions in the sixteenth century made by anatomy to obstetrics—those of Vesalius, Eustachi, and Fallopio. Vesalius (1514-1564), a doctor's son, a native of Brussels, studied arts at Louvain, and medicine at Montpellier and Paris. He then returned to Louvain. where he began to teach anatomy, of which he became Professor at Padua in 1537, and his name thus comes to be linked with those of Fallopio and Eustachi in the Italian School of Anatomy. He worked chiefly at human anatomy, and, according to Choulant, secured the services of the best artists of the day to reproduce his preparations. He is even said to have employed Titian, but as that artist was upwards of sixty years of age when Vesalius published his first plates, it is more probable that Titian deputed his pupil Stephen von Calcar 1 Op. cit., p. 8,