An introduction to the history of medicine : with medical chronology, bibliographic data and test questions / by Fielding H. Garrison.

  • Garrison, Fielding H. (Fielding Hudson), 1870-1935.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introduction to the history of medicine : with medical chronology, bibliographic data and test questions / by Fielding H. Garrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the radix of humanity itself.”1 Allbutt gives a striking picture of a medieval incisor who, in ligating an artery, paralyzed his patient s arm by crushing the musculo-spiral nerve and was after¬ ward pursued with curses by his miserable victim whenever he dared show himself in the street. If the Church “abhorred the shedding of blood/’ therefore, it is fair to suppose that, in the first instance, its aversion had the same human significance as the well- founded horror of hospitals and surgical operations which existed in the minds of the laity up to the end of the nineteenth century. As the physicians looked down upon the surgeons, so the surgeons of higher education, who in the Middle Ages could be counted on the fingers, looked down upon the barbers. The latter were, in the first instance, trained for the purpose of bleeding and shaving the monks. In the thirteenth century, the College de Saint Come was organized at Paris (circa 1210), constituting a guild the mem¬ bers of which were divided into the clerical barber-surgeons or surgeons of the long robe and the lay barbers or surgeons of the short robe, and, in 1311, 1352 and 1364, royal decrees were issued forbidding the latter to practise surgery without being duly ex¬ amined by the former. In 1372, Charles V 'decreecfthat the bar¬ bers should be allowed to treat wounds and not be interfered with by their long-robed confreres. The same thing happened in Eng¬ land, where the surgeons formed a separate guild in 1368, combined with the physicians about 1421, while the barbers obtained a sepa¬ rate charter from Edward IV in 1462. In this way, barber- surgery (the surgery of the common people) became “wound-sur¬ gery,” that is, was restricted to blood-letting and the healing of wounds. The barbers (tonsores) themselves owed their business largely to the fact that, after the monks were forbidden to wear beards in 1092, smooth chins and shaving became the fashion. In Germany the barber was often a bath keeper, who, in addition to bleeding, cupping and leeching, gave enemas, picked lint and extracted teeth, and his examination or “Meisterstiick” consisted in sharpening a knife or in preparing certain salves and plasters. Throughout the Middle Ages, there were some vague attempts to for¬ mulate the principles of medical jurisprudence, the earliest of these being, as Cumston points out, in the laws of the Germanic and Slavic tribes, the Salic law, the Capitularies of Charlemagne (ninth century) the Assizes of the Cru¬ saders, and, in the thirteenth century and after, the Decretals of the Popes and general canon laws. The procedure in such cases was often of the crudest kind, the tests being by ordeal, torture, de facto verification of impotence, and “ cruentation, ” or the spontaneous bleeding of a corpse in the presence of the true murderer. The expert opinions given were usually in the nature of hair- 1 The strolling herniotomists believed castration to be necessary because they thought the intestines and testicles were inclosed in the same sac, which must be removed in its entirety to obviate relapses and faulty healing of the peritoneum.