[66] The surgeons Cosmas and Damian were chosen patron saints of the new organization. They were born in Arabia in the third century, and are said to have been educated there. After having practiced medicine for a certain length of time in Sicily, they were tortured and killed, because of their Christian faith, by order of the Emperor Diocletian, 303 A. D. Hence the title “Saints.”
[67] Guy de Chauliac, who wrote a treatise on surgery in the latter half of the fourteenth century, also speaks of the value of this diagnostic sign.
[68] See remarks on the subject of amulets, etc., on pages 197, 198.
[69] A small town in the Department of Lot, France. The earliest Norman ancestors of the Gurdon family in England are said to have derived their name from that of this town.
[70] Introduction to the “Oeuvres d’Ambroise Paré,” Paris, 1840.
[71] “Gaddesden had for a long time been troubled how to cure stone: ‘At last,’ says he, in his Rosa Anglica, ‘I thought of collecting a good quantity of those beetles which in summer are found in the dung of oxen, also of the crickets which sing in the fields. I cut off the heads and the wings of the crickets and put them with the beetles and common oil into a pot; I covered it and left it afterwards for a day and night in a bread oven. I drew out the pot and heated it at a moderate fire, I pounded the whole and rubbed the sick parts; in three days the pain had disappeared;’ under the influence of the beetles and the crickets the stone was broken into bits. It was almost always thus, by a sudden illumination, that this doctor discovered his most efficacious remedies: Madame Trote [Trotula] of Salerno never confided to her agents in various parts of the world the secret of more marvelous and unexpected recipes.” (From Jusserand’s “English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages.”)
[72] Some weeks later our fellow voyager, Thomas Schoepfius, wrote to me that, on the return journey, he learned at Berne that “Long Peter,” the leader of the Mézières robbers, had been apprehended by the authorities and executed for his crimes; and that, when stretched on the rack, he had confessed, among other things, that he had tried to murder and rob some students who passed through Mézières on their way to Lausanne.
[73] Also often spelled “Falloppius.”
[74] The meaning of this Latin inscription can best be appreciated by those physicians who have, through a long period of years, practiced their profession largely among the well-to-do classes of a metropolitan city. They alone, I believe, would understand the significance of “lucrum neglectum” as applied to a large proportion of the gifts which a practitioner of medicine receives from grateful patients; and it is not at all likely that a layman who is not familiar with this aspect of a physician’s life would, under the circumstances mentioned, have the slightest suspicion that the device quoted above could possibly bear the meaning that I have given to it.
[75] See F. Loeffler: “Vorlesungen uber die geschichtliche Entwickelung der Lehre von den Bakterien,” Leipzig, 1887, Th. 1; and also p. 310 of Puschmann’s “Geschichte des Medicinischen Unterrichts,” Leipzig, 1889.