In the Naples Museum there are two ointment spoons with carved bone handles. Needles such as Hippocrates and Celsus speak of for stitching bandages to fix them were very frequently made of bone and ivory. Knife handles of bone and ivory are common. A carved ivory medicament box with sliding lid will be fully described later. Scribonius Largus describes knives of bone and ivory for preparing plants for pharmaceutical purposes (Compositiones, lxxxiii). An ivory pestle was found with a surgeon’s outfit in Cologne.
Stone.
Medicaments were prepared on stone slabs, and the great majority of oculists’ seals were of stone.
Execution and Ornamentation.
The execution of the instruments is, as a rule, all that could be desired, and the weight and thickness are no more than is consistent with the requisite strength.
Hippocrates points out the necessity for this:—
Τάδ' ὄργανα πάντα εὐήρη πρὸς τὴν χρείαν ὑπάρχειν δεῖ τῷδε μεγέθει, καὶ βάρει, καὶ λεπτότητι.
‘All instruments ought to be well suited for the purpose in hand as regards their size, weight, and delicacy’ (i. 58).
The ornamentation is simple and effective. In the round instruments like the probes it consists usually of raised circular ornamentation, with or without a secondary ornamentation on the raised ringing. In others there are longitudinal or spiral grooves running along the instrument. In some cases the bronze is decorated with an inlay of silver damascening. This is rare in the instruments from Pompeii, though there are two probes with a spiral inlay in the Naples Museum. The majority of the instruments treated in this way have been found in the western provinces, and they are of later date than the Pompeian. The handles of some scalpels belonging to the third century are beautifully inlaid with silver. Lucian, as I have mentioned, speaks of scalpels inlaid with gold. In the Mainz Museum there is a medicament box on the lid of which is inlaid a snake coiled round a tree, the tree and the snake’s body being outlined in copper and the snake’s head in silver. So far no damascened instruments are reported from Greece. Damascening began in Europe apparently in the first century, and reached its height in the time of the Merovingian kings.
Examples of plated instruments are not uncommon. I have a spatula dissector thinly plated with gold, and I have met with several ligulae plated with silver. One of these was so thickly plated that on cutting into it the silver, which was deeply oxidized on the outside and was, therefore, quite black, showed also a layer of metallic silver still bright on section.