Surgical Instruments in Greek and Roman Times

The object of this book is to lay before the student of medical history an account of the various instruments with which the ancient Greek and Roman surgeons prosecuted their craft. It is self-evident that no clear conception of a surgical operation, ancient or modern, can be formed from a written description without some previous knowledge of the instruments intended to be used. Many interesting operations described in detail in the classical authors are rendered obscure or quite unintelligible from lack of this knowledge. The learned Adams gives an accurate translation of a long and involved chapter by Paulus Aegineta on the use of the vaginal speculum, but remarks that owing to our want of knowledge of the specula possessed by the ancients the chapter is unintelligible. Daremberg says it is impossible to say what was the shape of any of the cutting instruments mentioned by Hippocrates. The steady progress of archaeological discovery has gradually added find after find of surgical instruments, till now there is scarcely a museum with any considerable number of antique petits bronzes which does not number among its contents a few surgical instruments, and in the Naples Museum alone there are hundreds. In several cases we know even the name of the original possessor of these and the special branch of surgery which he practised. There are thus open to us materials which were not available to the men of learning to whom I have referred above, and the time seems opportune to undertake a systematic review of all the materials at our disposal, and attempt to reconstruct the surgical armamentarium of the ancients. Considering the importance of the subject, it is surprising that no such systematic attempt has previously been made. Indeed, comparatively little attention has been given to this department of archaeology. Literature bearing on it is comparatively scarce. What we have is entirely continental, and consists of a series of reports of different finds with attempts to indicate the uses of the instruments described. In addition to these reports and the actual instruments scattered over various museums, we have at our disposal the writings of the ancient authors themselves. In these a fair number of instruments are minutely described, while many others are named, and here and there points about their shape are mentioned in different places; and by piecing these particulars together and deducing other facts from the nature of the manipulations the instruments are employed in, we can describe in detail, with a tolerable amount of certainty, a surprisingly large number of instruments. It must be confessed that these ancient classics are rather difficult of access, surprisingly so considering that until a few decades ago they were reverenced as works of authority for medical practice; but the fact seems to be that our predecessors were largely content to draw their knowledge of these authors from mediaeval Latin translations. Part of one of the most interesting authors has never been published in the original Greek, and for our knowledge of it we are dependent on a sixteenth-century Latin translation, supplemented, it may be, by fugitive consultations of codices in libraries and museums.

Dettagli