Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/183

Rh knife. And this may have been a part cause for the rise of those secular medical practitioners who, having been educated in the monastic schools, were, as barber-surgeons, engaged by the larger towns in the public service. Probably this differentiation was furthered by the papal edicts forbidding ecclesiastics from practicing medicine in general; for, as is argued, there may hence have arisen that compromise which allowed the clergy to prescribe medicines while they abandoned surgical practice into the hands of laymen.

Along with this leading differentiation, confused in the ways described, there have gone on, within each division, minor differentiations. Some of these arose and became marked in early stages. In ancient India—

"A special branch of surgery was devoted to rhinoplasty, or operations for improving deformed ears and noses, and forming new ones."

That the specialization thus illustrated was otherwise marked, is implied by the statement that "no less than a hundred and twenty-seven surgical instruments were described in the works of the ancient surgeons;" and by the statement that in the Sanskrit period—

"The number of medical works and authors is extraordinarily large. The former are either systems embracing the whole domain of the science, or highly special investigations of single topics."

So was it, too, in ancient Egypt. Describing the results, Herodotus writes:—

"Medicine is practiced among them [the Egyptians] on a plan of separation; each physician treats a single disorder, and no more: thus the country swarms with medical practitioners, some undertaking to cure diseases of the eye, others of the head, others again of the teeth, others of the intestines, and some those which are not local."

Though among the Greeks there was for a long period no division even between physician and surgeon, yet in later days "the science of healing became divided into separate branches, such as the arts of oculists, dentists, etc."

Broken evidence only is furnished by intermediate times; but our own times furnish clear proofs of progress in the division of labor among medical men. We have physicians who devote themselves, if not exclusively, still mainly, to diseases of the lungs, others to heart diseases, others to disorders of the nervous system, others to derangements of digestion, others to affections of the skin; and we have hospitals devoted some to this and some to that kind of malady. So, too, with surgeons. Besides such specialists as oculists and aurists, there exist men noted for skillful operations on the bladder, the rectum, the ovaria, as well as men whose particular aptitudes are in the treatment of breakages