Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/530

516 their terrible infirmity? Do we not see in our own time patients persuaded that a snake is devouring their insides, that their skull is bored with a gimlet? Do we not see simple maniacs possessed by like ideas? Are there not neurasthenics who have a helmet weighing upon their head and compressing their brain?



Have not hysterics their famous nail? And would not all these people of those times, less cultivated than in our time, however high their position may have been, be willing, in the paroxysms of their suffering, to submit to any operation that might be suggested in order to be delivered permanently? It was so formerly, and more especially in the era when sorcery had lost none of its prestige. It therefore seems logical to us to regard these operations, as Dr. Meige does, as pure deceptions of quacks; furthermore, we have the pictures to prove this.

Let us look, for example, at the painting of Brueghel le Vieux, in the Amsterdam Museum (Fig. 1). We are in a busy doctor's shop, where operations are performed without truce or mercy. Three surgeons are not too many to attend to the throng of patients. One rustic, already operated upon, looks slyly at his neighbor who is howling with pain and pushes away the assistants, while the operator is preparing, with formidable-looking forceps in his hands, to extract the troublesome stone. On the right, another operator, his head covered with a queer-looking long cap, is opening the incision through which deliverance is to come. In the background, an assistant is practicing upon a corpulent old fellow, while a fourth is trying to retain an unfortunate who is