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.

    175/776 (page 171)
    Certain criminal laws issued by the Bishop of Bamberg in 1507, and by the Elector of Brandenburg in 1516, led to the for¬ mulation (in 1521 and 1529) of the celebrated C.C.C. (Constitutio Criminalis Carolina), or “Peinliche Gerichtsorclnung,” published in 1533, which authorized the judge of a court to summon physi¬ cians or midwives as expert witnesses in such medicolegal cases as homicide, infanticide, criminal abortion, malpractice, and the like; but, in deference to current superstitions, postmortem ex¬ aminations were not authorized. The first judicial postmortem was made by Ambroise Pare in 1562, after which time the practice became common. Special laws were passed in regard to the sale of food, the adulteration of alcoholic liquors, street-cleaning, occupations, the plague, and other phases of municipal hygiene, but nothing was done to alleviate the condition of the insane, who were chained, beaten, starved, and otherwise maltreated, and frequently died of cold. In 1547 the monastery of St. Mary of Bethlehem at London (founded in 1246) was converted into a hospital for the insane, popularly known as “Bedlam,” and in a few years was amply justifying its reputation as conveyed in this term. A special feature of Renaissance legislation in France and England was the improvement of the status of the barber surgeons. In 1505, the Paris Faculty took the barber surgeons under its wing, in order to spite the surgeons proper, of whom it was jealous, and a few years later, these “surgeons of the long robe,” having failed to become a separate faculty, decided to make the best of a bad bargain by coming under the sway of the physicians. In England, in 1462, the numerous and prosperous Guild of Barbers became the Company of Barbers under Edward IV; the surgeons obtained a special charter in 1492; and in 1540, under Henry VIII, this Barber Company was united with the small and exclusive Guild of Surgeons to form the United Barber-Surgeon Company, with Thomas Vicary as its first Master. A celebrated painting of the younger Holbein represents Henry VIII, huge, bluff, and dis¬ dainful, in the act of handing this statute to Vicary, in company with fourteen other surgeons on their knees before the monarch, who does not condescend even to look at them. This picture, one of the best of Holbein’s works, not only gives a superb portrait of Henry VIII, but is probably the best representation in existence of the costume and appearance of the sixteenth-century surgeon. Of the many epidemic diseases which had beset Europe in the Middle Ages, three, the sweating sickness, leprosy, and epidemic chorea, had well-nigh disappeared by the middle of the sixteenth century. In France, Italy, Spain, England, Denmark, and Switzerland, leprosy was so well stamped out that the lazar-houses