Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/14

6 its infancy were condemned, in the beautiful language of Lucretius,


 * “Errare, atque viam palantes querere vite.”

It is, in truth, with a feeling of surprise, that, upon many important subjects, a candid inquirer discovers such various and accurate knowledge to have been attained as may be gleaned from a reference to the surgical writings of, , and.

Haller expresses his admiration at the fulness and accuracy of Hippocrates in his description and arrangement of the different species of dislocation. And although in his treatise on injuries of the head he denudes the bone, on suspicion of its being damaged, and directs the fissure of the skull to be eraded to obliteration, he is careful to lay down and warn us of the course of the sutures, ingenuously confessing that he had mistaken a fissure for a suture. It is to him we owe the original observation, that an injury of the brain paralyses the opposite side of the body. Celsus first describes the breaking up or dispersion, as well as the depression, of the cataract with the needle; and his account of the operation for lithotomy is the germ of the present most approved section, although he excludes all patients under nine and above fourteen years of age from the benefit of the operation. Galen’s proudest contribution to surgery was the discovery of the true contents of the arteries. "‘‘Primus, puto, coe-