[86] The modern operation known as litholapaxy.
[87] The word “centuria” is employed here in the sense of “a group of one hundred.”
[88] Not Amatus, but a specialist. See remark near the top of page 488.
[89] Orange, which is only a short distance from Avignon and Turriers, was ceded to France in 1713.
[90] In the absence of a more fitting place in which to speak of the employment of urethral bougies, it seems permissible to state here that the first mention (in medical literature) of these instruments occurs in Chapter XV. of the treatise of Guainerio, Professor of Medicine at the University of Pavia. This work, which was first published in 1439, bears the title: “Practica Antonii Guainerii,” and a later edition was issued at Venice in 1508. Speaking of a case of stone in the bladder, Guainerius says: “And if the urine does not flow from the bladder ... introduce a slender flexible rod of tin or silver into the urethra.”
[91] Franco calls it the “high operation” or “hypogastric lithotomy.”
[92] After I had written the preceding description of Franco’s new method of extracting a calculus from the urinary bladder, I learned, from Haeser’s account of the surgical writings of Susrutas in the Ayur-Veda (Sanscrit), that already before the Christian era (the exact date is not known) the surgeons of East India had performed this very operation. This fact, however, could not possibly have been known to Franco, who—so far as modern surgeons are concerned—should continue to be looked upon as the real inventor of suprapubic cystotomy.—Author.
[93] The fact that bullets are not hot when they inflict a wound was proven experimentally by Bartolommeo Maggi several years earlier, but Paré makes no reference to this fact.
[94] Johann Jacob Wecker (1528–1586), born at Basel, Switzerland, and author of a treatise entitled “Practica medicinae generalis” (Basel, 1585).
[95] In this instance I have thought it best to modernize the spelling of several of the words.