(From the treatise published by Tagliacozzi, Venice, 1597.)

(4.) Fabricius of Hilden, the distinguished German surgeon of the sixteenth century, assures us that his teacher, Jean Griffon, at that time the leading surgeon of Lausanne (but, at an earlier period, of Geneva), performed the same operation in 1592. The patient was a young Genevese woman whose nose had been cut off by some soldiers belonging to the army of the Duke of Savoy who were enraged at the resistance which she offered to their familiarities; and the operation proved most successful, “the new nose eliciting the admiration of all who saw it.” Fabricius adds that during the winter seasons, up to the year 1613, the tip of this nose presented a somewhat purplish hue. The woman married in 1603.

(5.) During the short lifetime of Tagliacozzi several tablets, on which laudatory inscriptions were engraved, were erected in the high school (archiginasio) of Bologna, and after his death a bust that represented him holding a nose in his hand was erected in the same building. Corradi, the medical historian (1833–1892), writes that in his time both bust and tablets had disappeared. Tagliacozzi’s remains were temporarily lodged in the cloisters of the church of San Giovanni Battista, and the report was circulated that, a few weeks after his death, a voice was heard saying that he was among the damned. Thereupon the remains were removed to the walls of the city, and the Tagliacotian method was soon forgotten, to be revived only after the lapse of many years.

All the data which I have reproduced in the preceding paragraphs seem to point to the conclusion suggested by von Gurlt, viz., that Tagliacozzi was willing to accept for himself a credit which belonged in reality to another, and that there would be more justice in calling the famous rhinoplastic method of procedure “the Arantian operation” than the Tagliacotian; especially as our knowledge of the method adopted by the younger Branca is entirely too vague to justify us in bestowing this honor upon him.

Giulio Cesare Aranzio (or Arantius) was born at Bologna about the year 1530. He studied medicine first in his native city, under the guidance of his uncle, Bartolommeo Maggi, and then afterward went to Padua, where he may possibly have been one of Vesalius’ pupils. In 1548 he made, at Padua, his first anatomical discovery—that of the musculus levator palpebrae superioris. Before he was twenty-seven years old he was chosen Professor of Medicine, Surgery and Anatomy in the University of Bologna, and he filled the position with distinction up to the time of his death on April 7, 1589—i.e., during a period of thirty-three years.

The part taken by Aranzio in the advancement of surgery was apparently of small importance. He succeeded, it is true (see remarks on page 479), in reviving the interest of contemporary surgeons in the possibility of restoring damaged parts of the human face by means of flaps taken from the patient’s arm. But I have not been able to discover that he made any other material contributions to this department of the science of medicine. It is possible, however, that his plan of illuminating the interior of the nose and of operating upon nasal polypi may possess some measure of originality; but I do not feel competent to decide this question. As regards the procedure just referred to, it may be stated briefly that Aranzio was in the habit, when operating within the nasal cavity, of using by preference, for illuminating purposes, the direct rays of the sun, which were allowed to enter the room through a slit or hole in the wooden window blind; and, when sunlight was not available, he used as a source of light the rays emanating from a lighted wax candle. In the latter case he increased the brilliancy of the illumination by interposing between the flame of the candle and the illuminated field, a glass globe filled with water,—an idea which probably originated with the goldsmiths or the shoemakers. The employment of light reflected from a concave mirror supplanted this method somewhere about the year 1866.

In Italy, during the sixteenth century, there were several surgeons—uneducated empirics—who contributed not a little to our knowledge of the radical cure of hernia; and of this number the members of the Norsa family (from Norsa, a small town in the district of Naples) were undoubtedly the best known and most experienced operators. Horazio Norsa, for example, is reputed to have performed the radical operation (in combination with castration) no less than two hundred times. It was this same Horazio Norsa who, in the latter part of his career, complained to Fabricius ab Acquapendente that, since the wearing of trusses had become so common a custom as it then was, the number of operations for the cure of hernia had greatly diminished.

CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SURGERY IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL DURING THE RENAISSANCE

According to the authority of Morejon, who published (1842–1852) an elaborate history of medicine in Spain and Portugal, these countries almost rivaled Italy, during the sixteenth century, in the number and excellence of their physicians. But, so far as I am able to judge from the record, very few of these men appear to have taken a strong interest in surgery, and of these few there are only three—Daza Chacon, Francisco Arceo and Amatus Lusitanus—who left behind them treatises which seem to call for a brief notice.

Dionisio Daza Chacon, who was born in 1503 at Valladolid, about one hundred miles north of Madrid, received his early training partly in his native city and partly at the University of Salamanca. After being engaged for some time in private practice he joined the imperial army (Charles the Fifth) in the capacity of a field surgeon in charge of a corps of three thousand men. In addition to these troops there were six thousand English archers, in the pay of the Emperor. At the two sieges in which these men participated—the siege of Landrecy in 1543 and that of Saint Dizier in 1544—Daza Chacon acquired an extensive experience in the treatment of both arrow and gunshot wounds, for the number of those injured on those occasions was very great. In 1545, after he had been chosen personal physician of Charles the Fifth, he returned home by way of Madrid, and distinguished himself greatly in 1547 by his self-sacrificing attendance upon the victims of the Plague in his native city. In 1557 he offered himself as a candidate for the position of Surgeon-in-Chief of the hospital at Valladolid, and, after passing with great credit the competitive examination, he was given the appointment. During the following six years he served that institution with conspicuous ability, and then accepted the position of private physician to Prince Don Carlos, the son of Philip the Second, King of Spain. Four years later he entered the service of Don Juan of Austria (the natural brother of Philip the Second), and accompanied this prince on his sea voyages to various parts of the Mediterranean; being with him, for example, on the occasion of the bloody sea fight in the Gulf of Lepanto in 1571. On reaching the age of seventy, Daza Chacon retired from active practice and devoted himself to the writing of his great work on surgery—“Practica y teorica de cirujia, en Romance y en Latin,” Valladolid, 1600; and several later editions. The date of Chacon’s death is not known, but it certainly occurred before the publication of his book.