But here occurs a difficulty, for we find William of Saliceto, the noted Italian surgeon of the thirteenth century, opening his work on surgery with the words, “My intention is, friend Montheus, to publish for you a work on manual operation in order to satisfy the petition of our associates.”[2414] It would therefore appear either that William’s work on surgery is a mere translation of some earlier treatise, or that William is also largely responsible for the so-called Secrets of Galen, and that he has throughout added new material and remarks of his own to those of Honein and the genuine or pseudo-Galen. This would not surprise us, for we have evidence that he was not the first to take such liberties with the work of Galen and Honein. Moses Maimonides, the Jewish writer of the twelfth century, says in his Aphorisms that in the treatise of Hippocrates on diseases of women, upon which Galen commented and which Johannitius translated, he has found many interpolations of a marvelous character “which some other person than Johannitius wrote and some other person than Galen expounded.”[2415] But it would be difficult to explain why our treatise in the manuscripts is quite generally said to have been translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, while William of Saliceto is never mentioned.
Patients and prescriptions.
The Secrets describes the writer’s treatment of such ills as stupor and chills, frenzy, headache, sore eyes, white growths in the eyes, earwigs, earache, bones stuck in the throat, nosebleed. His patients are likewise regularly mentioned and include old men of seventy and young men of twenty, one of the sons of the kings, a king’s daughter, “a man from the kings of Alexandria,” and another “man from kings,” orators, and “a man from one of the villas of the Romans” who was troubled with sciatica. He also describes pills for pains in the joints which he made for his young friend Glaucus,[2416] a philosopher of Beneventum.[2417] But he tells especially, as he had been asked to do, of his prescriptions for monks and ascetics, both men and women, who had ruined their health by their austerities.[2418] Be he Honein or Gerard of Cremona or William of Saliceto, the writer has no false modesty and says of his “alcohol” for the eyes, for instance, “This is the last word, and a great secret.” His recipes, however, are the usual sort of compounds and are limited to medicinal purposes, so that there is no reason for us to dwell upon them further.
Liber Medicinales de Secretis Galieni.
From its title one might think that a Medicinal Book of the Secrets of Galen in an Oxford manuscript[2419] would turn out to be the same treatise as the foregoing, but upon examination it is found to consist chiefly of the medicinal virtues of animals and parts of animals, beginning with man. The names of the animals are given in a foreign language, which is probably meant to be Arabic, and the text is accompanied by a series of spirited little miniatures of the animals in the margin, ending with the transmarine eagle. The work rather resembles that of Sextus Placitus on medicine from animals which precedes it in this manuscript and which we have discussed in an earlier chapter.[2420] The closing chapters of our text deal with the four humors. The superstitious and fantastic uses to which the parts of animals are put is indicated by the opening words of the treatise, “Bind on the tooth of a dead man.”
Rasis On sixty animals.
A very similar work on sixty animals is ascribed to Rasis in the 1497 edition of his works, and Albertus Magnus cites “the book of sixty animals” to the effect that the flesh of the dog is hot and dry.[2421] In reality in the treatise as it has reached us, only fifty-six animals are discussed, the first being the lion, and the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth, man and woman.[2422] Most of the animals treated are equally familiar, but some names have been left in Arabic. The work does not describe the animals and their habits, still less draw moral lessons or spiritual illustrations from them, but limits itself to their medicinal properties, or in a few cases, such as ants or mad dogs, to remedies against their bites. Much of the contents is of the same sort as Pliny’s discussion of the medical virtues of parts of animals, but the few authorities cited are Arabic or Greek,—Aristotle, Dioscorides and Galen. The work is very superstitious. With the right eye of a hedge-hog and other ingredients an eyewash is made which is supposed to enable one to see in the dark, while if the left eye of the same animal is fried in oil and a little of it inserted in a person’s ear on the point of a stylus, he is supposed to drop off to sleep at once.[2423] Eating a frog is recommended as a restraint upon sexual passion and upon conception.[2424] It is said that everyone will be terrified who enters a house that has been sprinkled with the water in which the animal called iaroboath has been drowned.[2425] If a man’s tooth and a hoopoe’s wing are suspended over a sleeper, he will not awake until they are removed.[2426] To cure tertian or quartan fever one places on the back of one’s neck with the left hand a powder made of a spider who has been captured while in the act of catching flies, pulverized, and stored in linen.[2427]
Eberus On the virtues of animals.
Very similar to, indeed perhaps in large measure identical with one or the other of the two foregoing treatises or with the De medicina ex animalibus of Sextus Placitus, judging from the description of it given by Valentinelli, is a work on the virtues of about seventy animals in a manuscript of the fifteenth century at Venice.[2428] Like the work of Sextus Placitus it opens with “the little beast which some call the taxo.”
Galen and Honein On Plants.