Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/353

 Galen and Avicenna, he wrote several practical works ("Consilia") on such topics as periodical insanity, stomachic vertigo, naso-pharyngeal polypi, epilepsy, lachrymal fistula, etc.

Antonio Cermisone was a native of Padua, became a teacher of medicine first in Pavia and afterward in Padua, wrote several useful treatises about various diseases, and finally died about 1441.

Giovanni Michele Savonarola—the grandfather of the celebrated Girolamo Savonarola, who was burned at the stake for heresy 1498 A. D.—held the Chair of Medicine in Padua from about 1390 to 1462, and also subsequently for a certain length of time in Ferrara. He was the author of a number of treatises on practical medical topics—such, for example, as fevers (first published in Venice in 1498), the art of preparing simple and compound aqua vitae (Basel, 1597), an introduction to the practice of medicine (1553), the baths of Italy and of the rest of the world (Venice, 1592), the different kinds of pulse, etc. (Venice, 1497)—and he also wrote a large work covering the entire field of medicine and modeled on the pattern of Avicenna's "Canon." The book is divided into six parts, each of which is preceded by an introduction that is devoted to the anatomico-physiological bearings of that particular part; and here, in addition, there are to be found scattered throughout the text references to surgical procedures. Among the references of this character the following deserve to be mentioned as worthy of some notice: the description of a speculum for use in operations upon the interior of the nose; a reference to direct laryngoscopy; the description of an instrument closely resembling the well-known syringotome; the treatment of curvature of the spine by mechanical means, etc. The book also reveals the fact that, already at this period of the history of medicine (the middle of the fifteenth century), physicians were beginning to take a more active part than they had previously done in the management of confinement cases, which as a rule were left entirely to the care of midwives. The records also show that medical men were interesting