History
Medieval Surgery
Medieval surgery refers to the surgical practices and techniques used during the Middle Ages, roughly from the 5th to the 15th century. During this time, surgery was often performed by barber-surgeons and was heavily influenced by religious beliefs and superstitions. Anesthesia and infection control were virtually non-existent, and surgical procedures were often crude and risky.
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7 Key excerpts on "Medieval Surgery"
- Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, Luis Garcia-Ballester(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
But surgeons (cirurgici) of that period were conscious of the immaturity of their craft, of its need to establish its disciplinary dignity, and while they supposed that this required them to achieve the same sort of rational systematization of knowledge as that enjoyed by medicine, they also accepted that there were still problems and techniques remaining for them to discover. For surgeons, therefore, arguing from practical results, as opposed to reason or authority, was perhaps easier to justify intellectually than it was for physicians, and their writings do often cite their own experience with particular procedures. 4 Furthermore, the increasing prominence given to anatomy in medieval surgeries, beginning with that of Guglielmo da Saliceto (1276), means that the world described by surgical authors seems to correspond more closely to our objective reality than do the humours and medicinal degrees, say, of the medieval physicians. Finally, it is easy for us to imagine that surgical treatments must have succeeded or failed more obviously than medical cures, and that the reactions of their patients would have forced medieval surgeons to learn from their mistakes, thus ensuring the positive technical 'progress' of surgery. 5 Let us therefore examine the history of one such procedure in the fourteenth century, the correction of a type of hernia, to see if indeed surgery offers a useful index to the character and potential strengths of practical medicine in the later Middle Ages. At the end of the thirteenth century, the Latin surgical tradition had come to believe in the technical possibility of operating to correct what today would be called indirect inguinal hernia
eBook - PDF- J. Citrome(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
To the profoundly penitential culture oflater medieval England, sin and sickness were inextricably linked; and surgery, even as it progressed in its ability to cure physical affliction, became even more important as a metaphor for the pursuit of spiritual health. This book therefore attempts to tell two stories. The first is that of the surgeon's rapid emergence as a figure of literary significance in the fourteenth century; the second is his simultaneous 2 SURGEON IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE transformation into both religious metaphor and psychological agent by an institution of unprecedented cultural influence. To tell these two stories is not a work of medical history, nor an exercise in literary criticism, but an examination of the social power of metaphor as it affected English society in the later Middle Ages. In this introduction, I will demonstrate the central fact that made the surgeon so convenient a metaphor for the urgent struggle between damnation and salvation that resided at the heart of medieval Christian identity: surgery, because it both healed and hurt, could uniquely signifY the profound ambivalence, the tension between merciful and puni- tive registers, that constituted humanity's relationship with the divine in the English Middle Ages. Surgery had long been marginalized in classical and scholastic definitions of medicine as the last possible resort in a threefold hierarchy of healing strategies. According to the eleventh-century Arabic authority A vicenna, whose great work The Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in Toledo in the twelfth century and parts of which became indispensable to the university medical syllabus, the "subject of treatment comprises three headlines: that of regimen and diet, that of the use of medicines, and that of manual operative interference.
No longer available |Learn more- Nigel Keith Maybury(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Austin Macauley Publishers(Publisher)
Chapter 10 Fourth Period
1085 to 1845. Surgery in Medieval Western Europe and the USA
Original Operations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Western Europe and the Early Modern United States of America with Subsequent DevelopmentsThe oldest university in Italy was Bologna, founded in 1088. Oxford University grew informally from 1096 and was recognised as a university by 1167. Cambridge Universitywas founded in 1231, the Sorbonne in Paris in 1258 and Montpellier in 1289. Many more followed. The universities of Medieval Europe were receiving and studying the ancient writings of the Greeks, now translated from Arabic into Latin, the language of medieval educated Europeans. Later the works of Hippocrates and Galen were translated into the vernacular languages of Europe.Students from all over Europe attended the Italian universities including John of Arderne (1307-1380) and William Harvey (1578-1657). The Greek subjects being taught included philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and surgery.Handwritten manuscripts of English translations of John of Arderns’s Latin writings were produced in the 1400s and became available to surgeons in England.Technological innovations introduced to Europe that had an impact on surgery, included gunpowder from China, about which we will learn more. Also, many Arabic words were absorbed into the European languages, such as alchemy (chemistry), algebra, sugar, camphor and cotton.Reference:- Fifteenth century Manuscript of John of Arderne Medical Treatises in English. Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department. 2006.
The practice of surgery changed dramatically in Western Europe when in 1163 Pope Alexander the Third at the Council of Tours pronounced an Edict, ‘Ecclesia Abhorret a Sanguine’. This is loosely translated as the, ‘Church is opposed to the shedding of blood by the clergy’. Widely interpreted by the clerics to mean that physicians who were all university educated and members of the clergy were now forbidden to spill blood by practicing surgery.
eBook - PDF- Luis Horacio Toledo-Pereyra(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
During the Middle Ages both surgery and medicine, especially anatomical con cepts, underwent a regression, resulting from the belief in recovery that was derived from prayers. Surgical practice was forbidden by the clergy, and quite frequendy operations were conducted by barbers. In 1240 the Scuola Salernitana was established under the protection of Federico II. Ruggero di Frogardo wrote Cyrurgia Rogerii, which dictated surgical teaching and practice in Europe. In this period Ugo and Teodorica Borgognone assured that wounds would re cover better and more quickly if they were nonsuppurating, having perceived by intuition the role of pus in patients’ conditions.3,4 Critical observation of every de gree of the inflammatory process may suggest whether the wound is better, either improving via natural reaction or via countering just in time any possibly inflamma tory change. Only during the Renaissance and 17th century was there a renewal in improve ment of surgical techniques, with new operations carried out. The most important surgeons of this period were Giovanni da Vigo, Gabriele Falloppio, Guido Guidi, Leonardo Botallo, Fabrizio da Acquapendente, Gaspare Tagliacozzi promoting rhynoplasty, and Marco Aurelio Severino with his banding of the artery preceding the aneurismal sac.5 William Harvey discovered and described blood circulation from heart to arter ies and veins. Marcello Malpighi completed this study, discovering capillaries. During the 18th century, progress became methodical and systematic. Surgery was improved by study of anatomic pathology. The biggest names of the time were Francesco Chopart, the Hunters and Percival Pott, and G. B. Monteggia.6 In the 19th century three elements permitted surgery to make great strides, and improved patients’ survival by the intuitions of G.T.
- David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
26 MEDICAL PRACTICE Katharine Park This chapter deals with medical practice in Western Europe, the institutions and circumstances that shaped it, and their evolution during the period from about 1050 to 1500. I have taken “practice” in its broadest sense, to refer to the varied activities engaged in by medieval Europeans of all classes in order to manage illness and to repair or maintain health. It includes approaches that spanned what we would call religion, magic, and science – the boundaries between those categories were less distinct in the Middle Ages – and included activities as varied as domestic nursing, faith healing, and the founding and administration of hospitals, as well as the work of the men and (occasionally) women who practiced physic and surgery in accordance with the principles of learned or text-based medical knowledge. 1 If medicine as a learned discipline was shaped primarily by the relation- ship between academic writers and their students and colleagues, 2 historians of medical practice focus rather on the relationship between healers and the sick. The distinction is both important and fairly recent. Earlier historians of medieval medicine tended to rely disproportionately on the perspective of learned surgeons and, especially, physicians, as well as on the atypical example of Paris. This resulted in a picture of medical practice that overemphasized the importance of elite healers and attributed to them (and to university culture in general) an exaggerated role in health care institutions and prac- tices, prompting premature claims about the emergence of medicine as a “profession” in the late Middle Ages.
eBook - PDFThe Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, Second Edition
- David C. Lindberg(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
These, along with many other translated works, helped to shape and redirect Western medicine in the later Middle Ages. 12 Fig. 13.3. Arabic surgical instru-ments from the treatise by Abū al-Qāsim al-Zahrāwī (Abulcasis), On Surgery and Instruments . Ox-ford, Bodleian Library, MS Hun-tington 156, fol. 85v. Medieval Medicine and Natural History 329 t h e t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f w e s t e r n m e d i c i n e In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a number of influences began to im-pinge on the European medical tradition and alter its character. The political and economic renewal of the period, accompanied by dramatic population increase, led to far-reaching social change, including the urbanization and expansion of educational opportunity. In the new urban schools the curricu-lum was broadened, as emphasis came to be placed on subjects that had been of minor significance, or even totally absent, in the monastic setting. Mean-while, reform movements within monasticism were attempting to diminish monastic involvement in secular culture (see above, chap. 9). The convergence of these movements brought about a shift in the location of medical education from the monasteries to the urban schools, with a corresponding shift toward professionalization and secularization. At the same time there was a growing demand among urban elites for the services of skilled medical practitioners, which contributed to the emergence of medical practice as a lucrative (and sometimes prestigious) career. The earliest example of renewed urban medical activity is at Salerno, in southern Italy, in the tenth century. By the end of the century, Salerno had acquired a reputation for its numerous and skilled medical practitioners, in-cluding clergy and women. There seems to have been no school in any formal sense, but simply a center (increasingly a famous center) of medical activity, with ample opportunities for men and women to master the healing arts through apprenticeship.
eBook - PDFThe History of Medical Education
An International Symposium Held February 5–9, 1968
- C. D. O'Malley(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
The best known are the illustrated chapters in al-Tasrif, by al-Zahrawi, which include tooth extrac- tion, plugging, crown and bridge appliance, filling and prosthetics. Physiology and surgery in Islam, as in Christendom during the Middle Ages, had very few competent promoters. This was mainly due to the taboo on human dissection. Fewer books were written on surgery than on any other theme related to the healing arts. This gives added reason to admire those few who dared to explore and tackle such a difficult and often im- popular subject among practitioners. It must be noted, however, that educated surgeons during this period were never considered less important than the well-qualified physicians. But only a few were devoted to practicing the art of surgery in view of the dangers, difficulties and uncertainties involved. To meet the ever increasing demand for surgeons the door was left wide open for bone setters, leechers, barbers, bloodletters and charlatans. More and more practitioners turned to internal medicine using diet and drug therapy and avoiding surgery. Notwithstand- ing, leading physicians from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries taught anatomy and physiology and emphasized their importance in the appreciation and practice of the healing art. The first essential step in developing this field was to translate earlier texts 62 H I S T O R Y OF M E D I C A L E D U C A T I O N on anatomy and surgery, especially from the Greek, a task undertaken by Hunayn and his associates in the ninth century. Indian surgery had also some bearing on Arabic medicine and few doctors were reported to have come to practice in the Abbasid capital (89). At the same time, Ibn Masa- wayh emphasized and encouraged special attention to the subject in medi- cal education. Al-Majusi also wrote on the importance of applied surgery, especially minor manipulations and on fractures and treatment of wounds.
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