Surgeon's Tale

For three years young Surgeon Harvey Graham, assistant editor of the British Medical Journal, grubbed in museums and medical libraries all over Britain. Fortnight ago he published the first popular "storybook of surgery,"* a book of more than 400 pages, crammed with forgotten incidents of scientific history from the neolithic age to 1938. It includes brief biographies which bring to life such geniuses as Galen, Hippocrates, Ambroise Pare, John Hunter, William Harvey, Joseph Lister. Bits from Dr. Graham's story:

> Rhazes, famed Arabian clinician of the 9th Century, used successful if violent psychology in treating neurotic patients. He once placed a rich man, who was crippled by rheumatism, in a hot bath. Then, leaving a saddled horse at the front door, he grasped a sharp knife, brandished it in his patient's face and reviled him. Infuriated, the man leaped out of his bath, while Rhazes fled to his horse. The patient was cured, but Rhazes never returned.

> Theodoric, Bishop of Cervia, Italy, an unsung surgical hero of the Middle Ages, insisted that infection and formation of pus, contrary to popular medical opinion, was not necessary for successful healing of a wound. He insisted that wounds be kept clean and dry. So fellow practitioners--who continued for hundreds of years the practice of searing wounds with boiling oil, covering them with such things as bacon, earthworms, rabbit fur, oil of lilies and a boiled concoction of young whelps "just pupp'd"--denounced him as a heretic. Theodoric, says Dr. Graham, was "as great an original thinker as Lord Lister," inventor of antiseptic technique.

> In 14th-Century Italy, public dissections were held in university halls and were occasions for great festivity. In the 16th Century, British surgeons were legally allowed to dissect dead bodies. Edinburgh surgeons were granted "ane condampnit [condemned] man after he be deid." But by the 18th Century, corpses were in such great demand by anatomists that "resurrection" of dead bodies "became a racket, the like of which Chicago never knew." Rival gangs robbed graves, lured victims to lonely inns, strangled them, sold the remains to innocent doctors. Londoners sang the popular ballad of Mary's Ghost, complaint of a resurrected girl to her lover: "The arm that used to take your arm

Is took to Dr. Vyse,

And both my legs are gone to walk

The Hospital at Guy's.

"As for my feet, the little feet

You used to call so pretty,

There's one I know in Bedford Row

The father's in the City."

> Dr. William Harvey, who discovered in the early 17th Century the way the blood circulates, was "a little man with twinkling* SURGEONS ALL--Rich & Cowan, London (18s.). eyes. . . . When he was lecturing he had a little wand of whalebone tipped with silver," which he used to point out organs he was dissecting. "A lecture on the liver ... he transformed into a subject of vital interest by ... references to bearbaiting and cockfighting, football and the ballet, and a strange bird in his Majesty's aviary. . . . Then he would conclude with a spirited attack on the fashion of lacing young girls till their waists were compressed . . . and their livers were fantastically deformed."

> Even up to the 19th Century it was considered scandalous in many places for a man to help in the delivery of a child. If skilled "man-midwives" were employed, they often had to cover their patients with "modesty cloths" before setting to work. In 1522, Dr. Wertt of Hamburg, Germany, dressed himself as a woman, went to a confinement. When found out he was burned to death.

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