Old-Time Makers of Medicine Part 19

[Footnote 15: Taddeo, who was born in 1215, according to our usually accepted traditions in the matter, would have been seventy-five years of age when Mondino as a youth of scarcely more than fifteen went to the University. It might seem that so old a man would have very little influence over the young man. Taddeo, however, had, as we have said, a very strenuous old age. Everything in life had come to him late. He was well past thirty before he began to study philosophy and medicine, having been a seller of candles from necessity because of poverty in his younger years. His great success in practice came when he was past forty. He first began to teach when he was forty-five, and he was nearly fifty-five before he began to write. According to tradition he married when he was nearly eighty--whether for the first or second time is not said--and while this might be considered, and would in some cases be, an indication of weakness of character (it would probably depend on whether he married or was married), it seems in his case to have indicated a vigor of body and character which shows very clearly how great was the possibility of his influence as a teacher having been maintained even up to this late time of life, and thus influencing a pupil who is to represent the most potent influence at the beginning of the next century.]

[Footnote 16: _Medical Library and Historical Journal_, 1906.]

[Footnote 17: Pilcher (_loc. cit._) tells of her tomb. I venture to change his translation of the inscription in certain unimportant particulars. He says:

"We know the very place where she was buried in front of the Madonna delle Lettre in the Church of San Pietro e Marcellino of the Hospital of Santa Maria de Mareto, where her a.s.sociate, Agenio, mourning and inconsolable, placed a tablet with this inscription:

D . O . M .

Vrceo . Contenti Alexandrae . Galinae . Pvellae . Persicetanae Penicillo . Egregiae . Ad . Anatomen . Exhibendam Et . Insignissimi . Medici . Mundini . Lucii Paucis . Comparandae . Discipulae . Cineres Carnis . Hic . Expectant . Resurrectionem Vixit . Ann . XIX . Obiit . Studio . Absunta Die XXVI Martii . A . S . MCCCXXVI Otto . Agenius . l.u.s.trula.n.u.s . Ob . Eam . Demptam Sui . Potiori . Parte . Spoliatus . Sodali . Eximiae Ac . De . Se . Optime . Meritae . Inconsolabilis . M . P .

This inscription may be translated as follows:

In this urn enclosed The ashes of the body of Alexandra Giliani, a maiden of Periceto; Skilful with her brush in anatomical demonstrations And a disciple equalled by few, Of the most noted physician, Mundinus of Luzzi, Await the resurrection.

She lived 19 years: she died consumed by her labors March 26, in the year of grace 1326.

Otto Agenius l.u.s.trula.n.u.s, by her taking away Deprived of his better part, his excellent companion, Deserving of the best, Has erected this tablet."

[Footnote 18: This is so striking that I quote their actual words from Gurlt, p. 704: "_Multoties fit percussio in anteriori parte cranei et craneum in parte frangitur contraria._"]

[Footnote 19: "Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery Down to the Sixteenth Century," London, 1904.]

[Footnote 20: Of course, for any extended knowledge of Mondeville, a modern reader must turn to Nicaise's translation of his "Chirurgia,"

which, with an introduction and a biography, was published at Paris in 1893. Nicaise's publication of this and of Guy de Chauliac's treatise has worked a revolution in medical history and, above all, has made these old authors available for those who hesitate to take up a work written entirely in Latin.]

[Footnote 21: In the very first book containing some account of human anatomy, a German volume by Conradus Mengenberger, called "Puch der Natur," the date of printing of which is about 1478,--that is, less than ten years after the printing of the very first book, the "Biblia pauperum," which appeared in 1470,--there are, according to Haller in his "Bibliotheca Anatomica," a series of ill.u.s.trations. This is the first ill.u.s.trated medical work ever published.]

[Footnote 22: Fordham University Press, New York, 1908.]

[Footnote 23: Fordham University Press, New York, 1908.]

[Footnote 24: See picture of the hospital ward at Tonnerre, in "The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries," 3rd edit., New York, 1911.]

[Footnote 25: "The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery," by T.

Clifford Allb.u.t.t, M.A., M.D. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1905.]

[Footnote 26: The beginning of the ma.n.u.script copy in the "Bibliotheque Nationale" is extremely interesting as an example of the English of the period, and alongside of it it seems worth while to quote the closing sentence as Nicaise reproduces them:

"In G.o.des name here bygyneth the inventarie of gadryng to gedre medecyne in the partye of cyrurgie compilede and fulfilled in the zere (yere?) of our Loord 1363 by Guide de Cauliaco cirurgene and doctor of physik in the fulclere studye of Mountpylerz.

"On page 191, verso.--Here endeth the cyrurgie of Maistre Guyd' de Cauliaco dottoure of phisik."

The University of Cambridge copy has the t.i.tle in the colophon. It runs as follows: "Ye inventorye of Guydo de Caulhiaco Doctor of Phisyk and Cirurgien in Ye Universitie of Mount Pessulanee of Montpeleres." The fly-leaf contains the words, "Jesu Christ save ye soule of mich." It is rather interesting to note how much closer to modern English is this copy, made probably not much more than half a century later than the first one and, above all, how much more nearly the spelling has come. At this time, however, and, indeed, for more than a century later, spelling had no fixed rule, and a man might spell the same word quite differently even on the same page. The difference between doctor spelled thus in the early edition, and doctours in the later one, probably means nothing more than personal peculiarities of the original translator or copyist.]

[Footnote 27: In Nicaise this last word is written _c.r.a.pte_. I have ventured to suggest _crafte_, since a misreading between the two letters would be so easy. In the same way I have suggested tentatively a changing of the _z_ in the t.i.tle of the Bibliotheque Nationale copy to _y_, making the word _yere_ instead of _zere_.]

[Footnote 28: "A History of Dentistry from the Most Ancient Times Until the End of the Eighteenth Century," by Dr. Vincenzo Guerini, editor of the Italian Review _L'Odonto-Stomatologia_, Philadelphia and New York, Lea and Febriger, 1909.]

[Footnote 29: The first printed edition of Arcula.n.u.s is that of Venice, 1542, bearing the Latin t.i.tle, "Joannis Arculani Commentaria in Nonum Librum Rasis," etc.]

[Footnote 30: It is curious to trace how old are the traditions on which some of these old stories, that must now be rejected, are founded. I have come upon the story with regard to Basil Valentine and the antimony and the monks in an old French medical encyclopedia of biography, published in the seventeenth century, and at that time there was no doubt at all expressed as to its truth. How much older than this it may be I do not know, though it is probable that it comes from the sixteenth century, when the _kakoethes scribendi_ attacked many people because of the facility of printing, and when most of the good stories that have so worried the modern dry-as-dust historian in his researches for their correction became a part of the body of supposed historical tradition.

It is probably French in origin because in that language _antimoine_ is a tempting bait for that pseudo-philology which has so often led to false derivations.]

[Footnote 31: There is in the New York Academy of Medicine a thick 24mo volume in which three of the cla.s.sics of older medicine are bound together. They are Kerckringius's "Commentary on the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," published at Amsterdam, 1671; Steno's "Dissertation on the Anatomy of the Brain," published in Leyden in 1671, and Father Kircher's "Scrutinium Physico Contagiosae Luis quae dicitur Pestis"

(Physico-medical Discussions of the Contagious Disease which is called Pest). This was published at Leipzig in 1659. Just how the three works came to be bound together is hard to say. Very probably they belonged to some old-time scholar, though there is nothing about the books to tell anything of the story. The fact that all three of the authors were ecclesiastics of the Catholic Church, Valentine a Monk, Steno a Bishop, and Kircher a Jesuit, would seem to be one common bond and perhaps a reason for the binding of these rather disparate treatises together. In that case it is probable that the book came from an old monastic library dispersed after the suppression of the order by some government. It seems not unlikely that the volume belonged at some time to an old Jesuit library, for they have suffered the most in that way. That these three cla.s.sics of medicine should have been republished in handy volume editions within practically ten years shows an interest in medical literature that has not existed again until our own time, for during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was almost utter neglect of them.]

[Footnote 32: Paper read before the first meeting of the American Guild of St. Luke.]

[Footnote 33: Published by Putnams, New York, 1909.]

[Footnote 34: Dublin, 1882.]

[Footnote 35: The material for this chapter was gathered for a paper read before the Medical Improvement Society of Boston in the spring of 1911. In nearly its present form it was published in _The Popular Science Monthly_ for May, 1911, and thanks are returned to the editor of that magazine for permission to reprint it here. The additions that have been made refer particularly to the estimation of Aristotle in the Middle Ages.]

[Footnote 36: New York, Putnam, 1908.]

[Footnote 37: "De Coelo et Mundo," 1, tr. iv., x.]