Surgeons
‘Geometrical Skill is rightly employed about Bone and Muscles, and other solid Parts of the animal Frame, which more eminently belong to the Surgeon’s Province; but it cannot be so useful to the Physician, whose principal, though not entire Business respects fluid Bodies’.[1]
Giovanni da Vigo, The most excellent workes of chirurgerie, made and set foorthe by maister John Vigon …, translated into English. Wherunto is added an exposition of straunge termes and unknowen symples, belongyng to the arte (London, 1571), title page.
The above quotation, from the early eighteenth-century English physician Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729), reflects his desire, as a physician, to delineate professional boundaries between early modern physicians and surgeons. However, as Bertoloni Meli and Klestinec point out, the boundaries between the work of physicians and surgeons had been in flux since at least the sixteenth century.[2] Two developments in the sixteenth century served to recalibrate relations between the two professional groups: the work of surgeons treating diseases such as the ‘Great Pox’ (syphilis), and the printing of Latin and vernacular treatises on surgery by learned surgeons. As Klestinec notes, surgical texts, whether originally composed in the vernacular (as was the custom of the famous French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (1510–90)), or subsequently translated from Latin into the vernacular, such as this text by the Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo (1450–1525), not only aimed to share the fruits of the surgeon’s experience with as wide a readership as possible – they also sought ‘to configure relations between surgeons and physicians’, in order to present them as ‘a unified group of learned practitioners’.[3] Many of these texts were collected by Edward Worth (1676–1733), and have been explored in our online exhibition on ‘Surgery at the Edward Worth Library’.
Worth’s 1571 edition of an English translation of Giovanni da Vigo reflects the importance of warfare as a stimulus for early modern surgical textbooks: Da Vigo was interested in the treatment of gunshot wounds – indeed Conti notes that he was the first Italian surgeon to publish on the issue.[4] Likewise, later in the sixteenth century Paré would produce seminal texts devoted to wounds of war. Da Vigo did this in his Practica in Arte Chirurgica Copiosa, which was initially printed in 1514, and Paré followed suit in his La Méthode de Traicter les Playes Faictes par Harquebutes et Aultres Bason de Feu (Paris, 1545). The latter’s work on ‘The Method of Treating Wounds made by Arqubuses and other Firearms’, would later be added to editions of his complete works: Worth owned a 1685 Lyon edition: Les oeuures d’Ambroise Paré … (Lyon, 1685).
Da Vigo would have witnessed a good deal of warfare as he was surgeon to Pope Julius II (1443–1513). The son of a surgeon, he had become physician to Julius II when the latter was still Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, and Da Vigo stayed on in Rome after his patron’s death in 1513, attending to the latter’s cousin. It was there he published his Practica Copiosa in Arte Chirurgia, and it proved to be a best-seller: there were no less than fifteen Italian editions in the sixteenth century and the text was also translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English.[5] It first appeared in English in 1543, translated by Bartholomew Traheron (c. 1510–58?), who lauded the text for its ‘goodly remedies, for the diseases that communely, and iustly happen vnto us’.[6] As Traheron notes, Da Vigo had ‘set forth more notable things in the arte of Chirurgerie, than any other hytherto’.[7]
Like many other surgical authors, Da Vigo was keen to emphasise the importance of a knowledge of anatomy for any surgeon and he addressed the symbiotic link between the study of anatomy and the practice of surgery in his first chapter:
‘Wherfore it is not onely requisite that Chirurgiens knowe Anatomie, but also Phisitions. For it is very harde for him, that is ignoraunt in Anatomie to worke commely and decently, in mans bodye, as in cutting, sewing, burning, or applyeng cauteries actuall or potentiall and semblable things’.[8]
Edward Worth’s anatomical collection further emphasises the symbiotic nature of the practice of anatomists and surgeons. Emphasising the connection between anatomy and surgery was not only a practical end – it could also fulfil a philosophical good, for as Klestinec argues, this focus on anatomy was a throwback to medieval texts which sought to situate surgery within an ‘academic medical tradition’.[9] Da Vigo certainly sought to underline his point by beginning his text with a chapter devoted to the importance of anatomy, ‘which is right necessarie for Chirurgiens’.[10]
It is not hard to see why his text became so popular: it covered a host of ailments and common injuries, both on and off the battlefield: gangrene, abscesses, fistulas, warts, hernias to mention the most obvious. He seems to have been particularly interested in head wounds, giving detailed descriptions of how instruments such as a trephine might be used in practice, but he also talked about more common problems such as dislocations and how to deal with fractures. And, needless to say, he also approached the thorny subject of how syphilis should be treated (the subject of his fifth book). Da Vigo’s text was, in many ways, very conservative: his chief authority was Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037), and his approach was conservative also – the knife was only to be used when all else failed.[11] However, his book was the first to discuss the treatment of syphilis and this, coupled with the fact that it was also the first comprehensive surgical textbook to follow on from the famous fourteenth-century text, Chirurgica Magna, of Guy de Chauliac (c. 1300–68), ensured that it dominated the practice of surgery in sixteenth-century Europe.
Wilhelm Fabricius Hildanus, Opera quae extant omnia … Additus quoque ob materiae similitudinem Marci Aurelii Severini liber de efficaci medicinâ, chirurgiae & medicinae cultoribus maximè utilis (Frankfurt, 1682), engraved title page.
While Da Vigo’s work offered a basis for the practice of surgery in the first half of the sixteenth century, the works of the German surgeon Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634) were to prove very influential during the second half of the century and well into the following century. He is sometimes confused with the famous contemporary Italian surgeon and anatomist, Hieronymus Fabricius of Acquapendente (1533–1619), who taught anatomy and surgery at the medical faculty of the University of Padua in the sixteenth century (whose works Worth likewise collected). Fabricius Hildanus, who is often called the ‘Father of German surgery’, may have lacked his colleague’s formal medical training, but in practice he was active in a wide range of areas: obstetrics, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, neurosurgery as well as general medicine.[12] Fabricius Hildanus was often on the move between Germany and Switzerland, and he was known to have visited France and The Netherlands, building up contacts there. He corresponded with leading physicians and surgeons across Europe and was a colleague of the famous Swiss physician, Felix Platter (1536–1614), whose work was likewise collected by Worth.[13] As Jones notes, Fabricius Hildanus became ‘one of the foremost surgical authorities not only in Germany and Switzerland but throughout a large part of Europe’.[14]
Fabricius Hildanus was particularly interested in innovative procedures, and was, like his countryman and contemporary Johannes Scultetus (1595–1645), especially active in devising new surgical instruments to improve surgical practice. Jones notes that almost all the surgical instruments illustrated in Fabricius Hildanus’ works were his own inventions.[15] He was always keen to innovate and did not slavishly follow earlier authorities such as Paré, adapting the latter’s block and tackle to deal with fractures.[16] As Laios notes, he introduced a number of new techniques and was one of the first to successfully amputate a thigh above the knee to prevent the spread of gangrene.[17] Naylor et al. draw attention to the importance of the introduction of his classification of burns into three degrees, which he introduced in his 1607 treatise De combustionibus (Basle, 1607).[18] He was not the only skilled and innovative surgeon in his home for he was lucky to have married Marie Colinet, a gifted midwife and surgeon in her own right, whose help he acknowledged on a number of occasions in his works. Indeed, he pointed to her excellence as a surgeon in one particularly thorny operation, where it was his wife who solved the problem of how to extract a metal particle from a patient’s eye.[19]
For Fabricius Hildanus, surgery was not confined to a manual operation to remove disease. He agreed with Da Vigo and Paré that a skilled surgeon needed to know anatomy. Indeed his work fits in very well with that of Paré – a fact given physical expression in the Worth Library as their collected works stand side by side in similar bindings. As Jones argues, both Paré and Fabricius Hildanus were keen to ‘raise the standard of Surgery’ and as part of this Fabricius Hildanus stressed that it was essential for a practising surgeon to also understand what had caused the disease in the first place.[20] He was always keen to promote the practice of surgery and to place it within the wider medical context by focusing not only on obvious operations such as dislocations, and fractures, but also on areas that were considered to be more medical than surgical: epidemiology and spa therapy.[21] This commitment is reflected in the title page of Worth’s 1682 edition of Hildanus’ collected works, which not only included his hundreds of surgical case studies (based on decades of his own experience) in his Observationes et curationes chirurgicam centuriae sex (1606), but also works on the preservation of health, such as his Consilium in quo de conservanda valetudine (1629), and on diseases such as dysentery: De Dysenteria (1616).[22] He was, as Bertoloni Meli notes, considered to be ‘one of the leading learned surgeons of his time’, and in Bern he was appointed as ‘medico-chirurgus’: both town physician and surgeon.[23] His work is symptomatic of the surgical texts bought by Worth who clearly favoured publications by well-known learned surgeons.
Johannes van Horne, Mikpotexnh: seu, Methodica ad chirurgiam introductio (Leiden, 1668), engraved title page.
Worth had studied for his MD at the University of Leiden and his extensive medical collection reflects the Leidenisation of Irish medicine during the period.[24] It is unsurprising to find that he collected texts produced by important anatomists and surgeons based there and few were as important as Johannes van Horne (1621–70), one of the most famous seventeenth-century professors of anatomy and surgery at the University of Leiden. Worth owned a Latin edition of Johannes van Horne’s guide to surgical method, Mikpotexnh: seu, Methodica ad chirurgiam introductio (Leiden, 1668), and a later English translation by Henry Banyer (1690–1749): Micro-Techne; or, a methodical introduction to the art of chirurgery: in which every branch thereof is handled in a most natural, compendious and perspicuous manner; and constant References are made, under each Head, to the Best Authors who have treated on that Subject more largely. Together with a Critique on the most Eminent Writers in the Art. Written in Latin by Johannes van Horne, Professor of Anatomy and Chirurgery in the University of Leyden. Translated with additions, by Henry Banyer, surgeon (London, 1717). To these he added anatomical works by students of Van Horne’s such as Jan Swammerdan (1637–80), Reiner de Graaf (1641–73), Nicholas Steno (1638–86) and Frederick Ruysch (1638–1731).
Van Horne, as Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Leiden, was naturally keen to situate surgery as a central part of medicine and was eager to cite ancient authorities to support his view: ‘From this Division, into which the Art of Medicine, is deduced, agreeable to Celsus, in the Preface of his first and seventh Book, that Part of it which cures by the Operation of the Hand, is not only the most antient, but also in many respects preferable to any other part of Physick, for its Certainty and Expedition in curing’.[25] He argued strenuously against a division of the practice of medicine which treated the ‘Practitioners of Surgery’ as ‘inferior in Dignity to them, who practice the more Medicinal part of Physick’.[26] Van Horne saw it as his role ‘to vindicate the Surgeons, in opposition to those, who are emphatically called Physicians’, but, wary of appearing too radical and opposing socially accepted norms, he advised surgeons to accept their lot.[27]
Quoting the first century Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Van Horne described a true surgeon as follows: ‘He ought to be a young or middle-aged Man, of a strong, steady and never-trembling Hand; as ready with the left, as with the right Hand; of a piercing clear Eye: He must be of an undaunted Courage, and unrelenting; fully resolv’d to be through with the Cure he has undertaken; unmov’d at the Cries of his Patient, lest he either makes greater haste than is convenient’.[28] He was, however, very much aware that it was not a case of ‘one size fits all’, and that specialization in the practice of surgery was not a new phenomenon, noting that there were some women who also acted as ‘Operators in Surgery’ for ‘some Diseases peculiar to themselves’, while other operators specialized as ‘lithotomists’ or ‘oculists’.[29]
Richard Wiseman, Several chirurgical treatises (London, 1686), Sigs 4F2v-4F3r.
Van Horne’s small volume on the practice of surgery not only acted as a useful introduction to the subject for his students at Leiden – it also introduced them to contemporary writers on the subject who Van Horne felt he could recommend. This was a select group which included (among others), Giovanni Da Vigo; ‘Ambrose Parey, that most skilful Surgeon to the French Kings, who, instructed by a long Series of Practice, much improv’d this Art’; and ‘Gulielmus Fabritius Hildanus, the Ornament of Germany’.[30] Since the Several chirurgical treatises of the English surgeon Richard Wiseman (bap. 1620?, d. 1676), first appeared some six years after the death of Van Horne, it was not included in the latter’s catalogue (though his English translator, Banyer, made sure to mention it in his preface to the 1718 English edition).[31]
Wiseman’s career harked back to that of Paré for he too had been a surgeon on the battlefield – in the above image we can see his interest in gunshot wounds, an area in which he developed considerable expertise. As Conti has noted, his Seven chirurgical treatises, first published in 1676 and bought by Worth in a 1686 edition, included descriptions of patients treated on battlefields during the English Civil War.[32] Indeed, as Hull suggests, his experience during the Civil War ensured his interest during peace time in trauma cases.[33] Wiseman, a royalist during the English Civil War, had proved loyal to Charles II (1630–85), and with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he had been appointed ‘surgeon in ordinary’, then ‘principal surgeon’ and ‘sergeant-surgeon to the king’, who evidently wished to reward his loyalty. Wiseman subsequently dedicated his major work on the practice of surgery to Charles II.
In many ways Wiseman’s magnum opus reflects the changing reputation of surgery over this crucial period in English history. Earlier English surgeons such as Thomas Brugis (b. in or before 1620, d. in or after 1651), had felt the need to put clear blue water between themselves and ‘empirics’. Brugis did this in two ways – by drawing attention to links between his work and that of ancient authorities, and by specifically warning his readers against ignorant empirics. In his Vade mecum; or, A Companion for a chirurgion, which appeared in 1651 and which Worth owned in a 1681 London edition, Brugis emphasised in his epistle dedicatory that his book was ‘an abstract of the Doctrine of Hippocrates and Galen, and other the best Writers to our time’ – and considered this a sufficient recommendation to protect him from attack from ‘the malevolent Calumnies of ignorant, impudent Pseudochyical Empyrics’.[34] Addressing his preferred audience, young surgeons, he warned them about the dangers of empirics:
‘Empirics, who slight Reason, and only build upon use, they inquire into the symptoms; they try medicines, which they call autopsia, i.e. self-feeling, or learn them tryed upon others, which is call’d history; or whatsoever they find in Books, then they use them by passing from like to like; either from disease to disease, as in erysipelas, and herpes; or from remedy to remedy, as in mespilo and citoneo, or from part to part, as brachium and tibia, &c. Remedies, they say, are fotruita imitatoria, or consult adhibeta; they allow only of evident Reason; Acron Agrigentinus was the first of this Sect, who had many followers; and of which there are too many at this day, such as the Pseudochymists’.[35]
Wiseman, on the other hand, began his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ with a decidedly more optimistic stance:
‘The nobility and dignity of Chirurgery are too well known to want the help of an Oratour to set them forth … they have rewarded us with Honour, Wealth and Collegiate Foundations both in Universities and great Cities. Among which sort our own Society in the City of London, established by Kings, and frequently encouraged by fresh Grants from them, ought to have an honourable mention’.[36]
In some ways Wiseman’s optimism reflects the growing strength of the community of surgeons in early modern England. The Barbers’ guild had had a charter (which focused on surgery) since 1462, and in 1520 the guild had joined with the ‘Fellowship of Surgeons to form the ‘Mystery and Communality of Barbers and Surgeons of London’.[37] The Company of Barber-Surgeons (established in 1540), had proved effective in warding off oversight by the College of Physicians of London.[38] Members of the latter institution, set up by royal charter in 1518, might fulminate against Da Vigo’s popular textbook in which, in their eyes, he ‘playeth the physician so much in all his workes’, but there was little they could do.[39] In fact, as Pelling argues, by the end of the sixteenth century, it was members of the Company of Barber-Surgeons, rather than their counterparts in the College of Physicians, who were ‘making a more active and original contribution to medicine’.[40]
Wiseman’s first interaction with the Company of Barber-Surgeons had begun in 1637 when he became an apprentice of Richard Smith, a member of the Company, for seven years. When Smith joined the royal army as a surgeon his apprentice went with him. Following Charles II’s flight to France after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Wiseman had been captured and imprisoned for several months. On his release he had set up as a surgeon at the Old Bailey in London, receiving the Freedom of the Company of Barber-Surgeons and his licence to practice.[41] Wiseman had played his own role in the Barber-Surgeons’ court of assistants, being elected as a member in 1664 and, in the following year, becoming master of the Company.[42]
Wiseman (like Brugis before him), was a firm believer in the importance of the practice of surgery and advised his core audience, young surgeons, that:
‘the farther he goeth on in practice, the more of clearness and plainness he will find; and the whole so much better performed than a meer Academick could have done it, without being a Practitioner himself, as a Traveller can describe a Country to one that is taking a journey into it more sensibly and usefully, than one that hath only read of it and seen it in Maps’.[43]
While he did not ignore ancient and contemporary authors, he elevated his own experience over their errors.[44] At the same time, he thought it vital to include his own failures so that young surgeons might learn from them:
‘thereby increasing knowledge in our Profession, and leaving Sea-marks for the discovery of such Rocks as they themselves have split upon before. For my part, I have done it faithfully, and thought it no disgrace to let the world see where I failed of success that those that come after me may learn what to avoid: there being more of instructiveness often in an unfortunate case than in a fortunate one’.[45]
He was, as he said himself, ‘a Practiser, not an Academick’, and therefore eschewed a more philosophical approach.[46]
As McVaugh has shown, Wiseman’s Several chirurgical treatises not only provided his readers with a treasure trove of surgical case histories (in much the same way as Fabricius Hildanus had done). He also, perhaps inadvertently, sheds on professional relations in seventeenth-century London. In his many case histories Wiseman noted the other medical practitioners he was working with, be they physicians, apothecaries, or fellow surgeons. Over the course of his career we can witness a growing self-assurance: McVaugh compares Wiseman’s deferential interaction with Francis Prujean (1597–1666), an eminent physician who was also his elder, and the far more relaxed and equal working relationship he developed with a younger physician, Walter Needham (1632–91), who shared Wiseman’s interested in anatomy. This growing confidence may be seen in his declaration in his preface that, while he had asked Needham to in effect proof read his text, when at times he diverged from Needham’s view, he kept in his own.[47] Whereas he had primarily worked for Prujean, he now worked with Needham. This of course reflects Wiseman’s personal interactions with these physicians but it also points to a growing self-confidence within the surgical community of early modern England.
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
Sources
Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, and Cynthia Klestinec, ‘Renaissance Surgery between learning and craft’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017), 1–5.
Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, ‘“Ex Museolo Nostro Machaonico”: Collecting, Publishing and Visualization in Fabricius Hildanus’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017), 98–116.
Blackmore, Sir Richard, A treatise upon the small-pox, in two parts. Containing, I. An account of the nature and several kinds of that disease, with the proper methods of cure. II. A dissertation upon the modern practice of inoculation. By Sir Richard Blackmore, Knt. (London, 1723).
Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘Collecting medicine in early eighteenth-century Dublin: the library of Edward Worth’, in John Cunningham (ed.), Early Modern Ireland and the world of medicine: Practitioners, collectors and contexts (Manchester, 2019), pp 165–87.
Brugis, Thomas, Vade mecum: or, A companion for a chirurgion. Fitted for sea, or land; peace, or war. Shewing the use of his instruments, and virtues of medicines simple and compound most in use, and how to make them up after the best method. With the manner of making reports to a magistrate, or corroner’s inquest. A treatise of bleeding at the nose. With directions for bleeding, purging, vomiting, &c (London, 1681).
Conti, Andrea A., ‘The anatomical and historical background of surgery: major surgical achievements during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, 124, no. 2 (2019), 212–5.
Da Vigo, Giovanni, The most excellent workes of chirurgerie, made and set foorthe by maister John Vigon …, translated into English. Wherunto is added an exposition of straunge termes and unknowen symples, belongyng to the arte (London, 1571).
Ellis, Harold, ‘Richard Wiseman: the best-known English surgeon of the 17th century’, British Journal of Hospital Medicine, 81, no. 11 (2020), 1–2.
Gurunluoglu, Raffi, Aslin Gurunluoglu, and Hildegunde Piza-Katzer, ‘Review of the Chirurgia, of Giovanni de Vigo: Estimate of his position in the history of surgery’, World Journal of Surgery, 27 (2003), 616–23.
Hull, G., ‘Richard Wiseman 1622–1676’, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons, England, 78, no.4 (1996), 193–5.
Jones, Ellis W.P., ‘The Life and Works of Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634), Part I’, Medical History, 4, no. 2 (1960), 112–34.
Jones, Ellis W.P., ‘The Life and Works of Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634), Part II’, Medical History, 4, no. 3 (1960), 196–209.
Kirkpatrick, J.J.R., B. Curtis, A.M. Fitzgerald, and I.L. Naylor, ‘A modern translation and interpretation of the treatise on burns of Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634)’, British Journal of Plastic Surgery, 48 (1995), 460–70.
Kirkup, John, ‘Richard Wiseman (bap. 1620?, d. 1676)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).
Klestinec, Cynthia, ‘Translating Learned Surgery’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017), 34–50.
Laios, Konstantinos, ‘Wilhelm Fabricius von Hilden (1560–1634): The Pioneer of German Surgery’, History of Innovation, 25, no. 3 (2018), 301–3.
McVaugh, M.R., ‘Richard Wiseman and the Medical Practitioners of Restoration London’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 62, no. 2 (2007), 125–140.
Naylor, I.L., B. Curtis and J.J.R. Kirkpatrick, ‘Treatment of Burn Scars and Contractures in the early Seventeenth Century: Wilhelm Fabry’s Approach’, Medical History, 40 (1996), 472–86.
Pelling, Margaret and Charles Webster, ‘Medical practitioners’, in Webster, Charles (ed.), Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1979), pp 165–235.
Roberts, R.S., ‘The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England, part II, London’, Medical History, 6, no. 4 (1962), 217–34.
Tubbs, R. Shane, et al., ‘Wilhelm Fabricius von Hilden (Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus) 1560–1634: pioneer of early neurosurgery’, Child. Nerv. Syst., 28 (2012), 657–59.
Van Horne, Johannes, Mikpotexnh: seu, Methodica ad chirurgiam introductio (Leiden, 1668).
Van Horne, Johannes, Micro-Techne; or, a methodical introduction to the art of chirurgery: in which every branch thereof is handled in a most natural, compendious and perspicuous manner; and constant References are made, under each Head, to the Best Authors who have treated on that Subject more largely. Together with a Critique on the most Eminent Writers in the Art. Written in Latin by Johannes van Horne, Professor of Anatomy and Chirurgery in the University of Leyden. Translated with additions, by Henry Banyer, surgeon (London, 1717).
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Wiseman, Richard, Several chirurgical treatises (London, 1686).
[1] Blackmore, Sir Richard, A treatise upon the small-pox, in two parts. Containing, I. An account of the nature and several kinds of that disease, with the proper methods of cure. II. A dissertation upon the modern practice of inoculation. By Sir Richard Blackmore, Knt. (London, 1723), p. xxix.
[2] Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, and Cynthia Klestinec, ‘Renaissance Surgery between learning and craft’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017), 2.
[3] Klestinec, Cynthia, ‘Translating Learned Surgery’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017), 35.
[4] Conti, Andrea A., ‘The anatomical and historical background of surgery: major surgical achievements during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, 124, no. 2 (2019), 213.
[5] On the Italian editions see Klestinec, ‘Translating Learned Surgery’, 40.
[6] Da Vigo, Giovanni, The most excellent workes of chirurgerie, made and set foorthe by maister John Vigon …, translated into English. Wherunto is added an exposition of straunge termes and unknowen symples, belongyng to the arte (London, 1571), Sig. [double cross]2v.
[7] Ibid., Sig. [double cross]2r.
[8] Ibid., fol. 1r.
[9] Klestinec, ‘Translating Learned Surgery’, 43.
[10] Da Vigo, The most excellent workes of chirurgerie, fol. 1r.
[11] Gurunluoglu, Raffi, Aslin Gurunluoglu, and Hildegunde Piza-Katzer, ‘Review of the Chirurgia, of Giovanni de Vigo: Estimate of his position in the history of surgery’, World Journal of Surgery, 27 (2003), 622–3.
[12] Tubbs, R. Shane, et al., ‘Wilhelm Fabricius von Hilden (Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus) 1560–1634: pioneer of early neurosurgery’, Child. Nerv. Syst., 28 (2012), 657; 659.
[13] Fabricius Hildanus was surgeon-in-ordinary at Durlach, the court of George Frederick, Margrave of Baden and Hochberg at the same time that Felix Platter was physician-in-ordinary there: Kirkpatrick, J.J.R., B. Curtis, A.M. Fitzgerald, and I.L. Naylor, ‘A modern translation and interpretation of the treatise on burns of Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634)’, British Journal of Plastic Surgery, 48 (1995), 469.
[14] Jones, Ellis W.P., ‘The Life and Works of Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634), Part II’, Medical History, 4, no. 3 (1960), 208.
[15] Ibid.,196.
[16] Ibid., 202.
[17] Laios, Konstantinos, ‘Wilhelm Fabricius von Hilden (1560–1634): The Pioneer of German Surgery’, History of Innovation, 25, no. 3 (2018), 301.
[18] On this see Naylor, I.L., B. Curtis and J.J.R. Kirkpatrick, ‘Treatment of Burn Scars and Contractures in the early Seventeenth Century: Wilhelm Fabry’s Approach’, Medical History, 40 (1996), 472–86; and Kirkpatrick, J.J.R., B. Curtis, A.M. Fitzgerald, and I.L. Naylor, ‘A modern translation and interpretation of the treatise on burns of Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634)’, 460–70.
[19] Jones, ‘The Life and Works of Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634), Part II’, 203.
[20] Ibid., 197.
[21] Ibid., 207.
[22] Bertoloni Meli argues that Hildanus played a crucial role in developing a new sub-genre of surgical observationes, which focused on the many manual operations he undertook throughout his career, and that in this sense sought to reaffirm ‘his professional identity as a surgeon’: Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, ‘“Ex Museolo Nostro Machaonico”: Collecting, Publishing and Visualization in Fabricius Hildanus’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017), 115.
[23] Ibid., 98, 102, 109.
[24] On the Leidenization of Irish medicine see Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘Collecting medicine in early eighteenth-century Dublin: the library of Edward Worth’, in John Cunningham (ed.), Early Modern Ireland and the world of medicine: Practitioners, collectors and contexts (Manchester, 2019), pp 176–8.
[25] Van Horne, Johannes, Micro-Techne; or, a methodical introduction to the art of chirurgery: in which every branch thereof is handled in a most natural, compendious and perspicuous manner; and constant References are made, under each Head, to the Best Authors who have treated on that Subject more largely. Together with a Critique on the most Eminent Writers in the Art. Written in Latin by Johannes van Horne, Professor of Anatomy and Chirurgery in the University of Leyden. Translated with additions, by Henry Banyer, surgeon (London, 1717), pp 2–3.
[26] Ibid., p. 11.
[27] Ibid., pp 11 and 13.
[28] Ibid., p. 15.
[29] Ibid., pp 15–6.
[30] Ibid., pp 182–4.
[31] Ibid., p. xvii.
[32] Conti, Andrea A., ‘The anatomical and historical background of surgery: major surgical achievements during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, 124, no. 2 (2019), 214.
[33] Hull, G., ‘Richard Wiseman 1622–1676’, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons, England, 78, no. 4 (1996), 193–5.
[34] Brugis, Thomas, Vade mecum: or, A companion for a chirurgion. Fitted for sea, or land; peace, or war. Shewing the use of his instruments, and virtues of medicines simple and compound most in use, and how to make them up after the best method. With the manner of making reports to a magistrate, or corroner’s inquest. A treatise of bleeding at the nose. With directions for bleeding, purging, vomiting, &c (London, 1681), Sig. A3r.
[35] Ibid., Sig. A5r.
[36] Wiseman, Richard, Several chirurgical treatises (London, 1686), Sig. *4r.
[37] Pelling, Margaret and Charles Webster, ‘Medical practitioners’, in Webster, Charles (ed.), Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1979), p. 173.
[38] Ibid., p. 174.
[39] Cited in Roberts, R.S., ‘The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England, part II, London’, Medical History, 6 (1962), 225.
[40] Pelling and Webster, ‘Medical practitioners’, p. 177.
[41] Ellis, Harold, ‘Richard Wiseman: the best known English surgeon of the 17th century’, British Journal of Hospital Medicine, 81, no. 11 (2020), 1.
[42] Kirkup, John, ‘Richard Wiseman (bap. 1620?, d. 1676)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).
[43] Wiseman, Richard, Several chirurgical treatises (London, 1686), Sig. *4v.
[44] Ibid., Sig. (a)1r.
[45] Ibid., Sig. (a)1v.
[46] Ibid., Sig. (a)1r.
[47] Ibid., Sig. (a)1r.