Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/529

Rh to the operations of wandering quacks or mountebanks, such as the pictures represent, the sebaceous cyst or the common pimple, the caseous contents of which may possibly become chalky and hard like a stone. There are also pimples scattered over the forehead and the cranium which may be freed from their cores by a stroke or two of the bistoury. Large operations on the head were certainly known in those days; for trepanation, with which Hippocrates was acquainted, goes back, as any anthropologist will tell us, to prehistoric times. But our quacks could not have become skillful in such bold attempts; and if they had

 An engraving from the picture of Pierre Brueghel le Vieux, in the engravings room of the Amsterdam Museum. (Flemish school of the sixteenth century.)

only pimples to remove, there would have been no need of making a triumphant display of a stone or of piles of stones.

In his very judicious interpretation of these pictures. Dr. Henry Meige concludes that they relate to operations which were for the most part purely factitious and addressed to subjects of disordered minds. Instead of talking of bees in their bonnets, they said in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of persons a little off the balance that they had a stone in their head; and if one of such unfortunates happened to recover, they said, just as carelessly, that a stone had been taken out of his head.

When such a way of talking was current with the public, what is there to surprise one that the quacks of the period should be on the, lookout to make innocent and half-witted persons believe that they were masters of the surest process to cure them of