Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/507

 A. Middeldorpf, Berlin. The text of this very early German work on the practice of surgery furnishes ample evidence to show that the author was worthy to be ranked among the leading surgeons of the fifteenth century. At page fifty-seven, says von Gurlt, may be read the remarkable statement that, in the case of a wound of the intestinal canal, one may cut through that organ at the point of injury and then introduce into the opposite ends of the divided bowel a silver tube the margins of which have been carefully bent so as not to offer at any point a cutting edge. The tube may then be tied in place with thread of green silk. (Von Gurlt speaks of this as the forerunner of Murphy's button.) Speaking of wounds caused by arrows, Pfolspeundt says that, to insure the patient's recovery, the planet under which he happens at that time to be, should be in favorable conjunction. In one case which came under Pfolspeundt's care he was obliged to pay an astrologer the sum of fifty gulden in order to ascertain whether the planet in question was or was not in a favorable conjunction.

There is only one place in the entire book, says von Gurlt, where a gunshot wound is mentioned, and then only incidentally; but this is positively the first reference (about the middle of the fifteenth century) to such wounds discoverable in medical literature.

Among the topics which are treated quite fully and in such a manner as to show clearly that the author was well versed in at least this part of operative surgery, those relating to rhinoplasty deserve to receive special mention. From the viewpoint of history, this part of the book is of very great importance. In no other treatise, says von Gurlt, do we find an equally detailed and satisfactory account of the operative method employed by the Two Brancas (father and son, from Catania, Italy), who were contemporaries of Pfolspeundt. The latter learned this method from an Italian surgeon, whose name he does not mention, and he was particularly careful not to divulge the essential details to anybody except two of his brethren in the Order to which he belonged.

For anaesthetic purposes in operative cases, Pfolspeundt