Tools

Much information and an occasional twinge are provided the layman in the newly published History and Evolution of Surgical Instruments by Dr. C. J. S. Thompson (Schumann's; $8.50). Among many practical saws, knives and pincers illustrated therein, none is more interesting in a mechanical way than the 17th-Century triploides. This was not part of a torturer's tool kit but, as the Latin inscription conveys, a surgeon's device for raising a depressed fracture of the skull.

Many of the chief instruments of surgery were known and used at the time of Hippocrates, 400 B.C., and some of them have changed little since. Some Roman scalpels would hardly look out of place on the instrument table of a modern operating theater.

To surgeons Dr. Thompson's book is doubly important. It is the only available record of the great collection of surgical instruments at London's Royal College of Surgeons. Shortly after Dr. Thompson had finished his book last spring, the collection was blitzed to smithereens.

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