[7] "Anat. Antiq. Rariores," Vienna, 1835.
[8] It seems hard to understand how so useful an auxiliary to the surgeon as the ligature,—it seems indispensable to us,—could possibly be allowed to go out of use and even be forgotten. It will not be difficult, however, for anyone who recalls the conditions that obtained in old-time surgery. The ligature is a most satisfying immediate resource in stopping bleeding from an artery, but a septic ligature inevitably causes suppuration and almost inevitably leads to secondary hemorrhage. In the old days of septic surgery secondary hemorrhage was the surgeon's greatest and most dreaded bane. Some time from the fifth to the ninth day a septic ligature came away under conditions such that inflammatory disturbance had prevented sealing of the vessel. If the vessel was large, then the hemorrhage was fast and furious and the patient died in a few minutes. After a surgeon had had a few deaths of this kind he dreaded the ligature. He abandoned its use and took kindly to such methods as the actual cautery, red-hot knives for amputations, and the like, that would sear the surfaces of tissues and the blood-vessels, and not give rise to secondary hemorrhage. A little later, however, someone not familiar with secondary risks would reinvent the ligature. If he were cleanly in his methods and, above all, if he were doing his work in a new hospital, the ligature worked very well for a while. If not, it soon fell into innocuous desuetude again.
[9] Puschmann: "Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin," Vol. I, page 652.
[10] The first dentist who filled teeth with amalgam in New York, some eighty years ago, had to flee for his life, because of a hue and cry set up that he was poisoning his patients with mercury.
[11] "Storia de la Scuola di Salerno."
[12] It is probably interesting to note that the word universitas as used here has no reference to our word university, but refers to the whole world of students as it were. In the Middle Ages universities were called studia generalia, general studies—that is, places where everything could be studied and where everyone from any part of the world could study. Our use of the word university in the special modern sense of the term comes from the formal mode of address to the faculty of a university when Popes or rulers sent them authoritative documents. Such documents began with the expression Universitas vestra, all of you (in the old-time English, as preserved in the Irish expression, "the whole of ye"), referring to all the members of the faculty. The transfer to our term and signification university was not difficult.
[13] Physicians wore a particular garb consisting of a cloak and often a mask, supposed to protect them from infections at this time, so that it was not difficult to make a characteristic picture as a sign for a pharmacy. These symbolic signs were much commoner and very necessary when people generally were not able to read. It is from that period that we have the mortar and pestle as also the colored lights in the windows of the drug stores, and the many-colored barber-pole. Also the big boot, key, watch, hat, bonnet, and the like, the last symbolic sign invention apparently being the wooden Indian for the tobacco store.
[14] The Medical Library and Historical Journal, Brooklyn, December, 1906.
[15] Taddeo, who was born in 1215, according to our usually accepted traditions in the matter, would have been seventy-five years of age when Mondino as a youth of scarcely more than fifteen went to the University. It might seem that so old a man would have very little influence over the young man. Taddeo, however, had, as we have said, a very strenuous old age. Everything in life had come to him late. He was well past thirty before he began to study philosophy and medicine, having been a seller of candles from necessity because of poverty in his younger years. His great success in practice came when he was past forty. He first began to teach when he was forty-five, and he was nearly fifty-five before he began to write. According to tradition he married when he was nearly eighty—whether for the first or second time is not said—and while this might be considered, and would in some cases be, an indication of weakness of character (it would probably depend on whether he married or was married), it seems in his case to have indicated a vigor of body and character which shows very clearly how great was the possibility of his influence as a teacher having been maintained even up to this late time of life, and thus influencing a pupil who is to represent the most potent influence at the beginning of the next century.
[16] Medical Library and Historical Journal, 1906.