SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS
IN GREEK AND ROMAN TIMES
BY
JOHN STEWART MILNE, M.A., M.D. Aberd.
KEITH GOLD MEDALLIST IN CLINICAL SURGERY
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1907
HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO
PREFACE
The object of this book is to lay before the student of medical history anaccount of the various instruments with which the ancient Greek and Romansurgeons prosecuted their craft. It is self-evident that no clearconception of a surgical operation, ancient or modern, can be formed froma written description without some previous knowledge of the instrumentsintended to be used. Many interesting operations described in detail inthe classical authors are rendered obscure or quite unintelligible fromlack of this knowledge. The learned Adams gives an accurate translation ofa long and involved chapter by Paulus Aegineta on the use of the vaginalspeculum, but remarks that owing to our want of knowledge of the speculapossessed by the ancients the chapter is unintelligible. Daremberg says itis impossible to say what was the shape of any of the cutting instrumentsmentioned by Hippocrates. The steady progress of archaeological discoveryhas gradually added find after find of surgical instruments, till nowthere is scarcely a museum with any considerable number of antique petitsbronzes which does not number among its contents a few surgicalinstruments, and in the Naples Museum alone there are hundreds. In severalcases we know even the name of the original possessor of these and thespecial branch of surgery which he practised. There are thus open to usmaterials which were not available to the men of learning to whom I havereferred above, and the time seems opportune to undertake a systematicreview of all the materials at our disposal, and attempt to reconstructthe surgical armamentarium of the ancients. Considering the importance ofthe subject, it is surprising that no such systematic attempt haspreviously[Pg iv] been made. Indeed, comparatively little attention has beengiven to this department of archaeology. Literature bearing on it iscomparatively scarce. What we have is entirely continental, and consistsof a series of reports of different finds with attempts to indicate theuses of the instruments described. In addition to these reports and theactual instruments scattered over various museums, we have at our disposalthe writings of the ancient authors themselves. In these a fair number ofinstruments are minutely described, while many others are named, and hereand there points about their shape are mentioned in different places; andby piecing these particulars together and deducing other facts from thenature of the manipulations the instruments are employed in, we candescribe in detail, with a tolerable amount of certainty, a surprisinglylarge number of instruments. It must be confessed that these ancientclassics are rather difficult of access, surprisingly so considering thatuntil a few decades ago they were reverenced as works of authority formedical practice; but the fact seems to be that our predecessors werelargely content to draw their knowledge of these authors from mediaevalLatin translations. Part of one of the most interesting authors has neverbeen published in the original Greek, and for our knowledge of it we aredependent on a sixteenth-century Latin translation, supplemented, it m