Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/527

 bears his name. The facts which throw some light upon this question may be stated in the following paragraphs:—

(1.) Tagliacozzi's Latin is not easy to understand, and he certainly does not furnish satisfactory information as to the manner in which he learned the details of the operation which we are here considering. Vesalius, Paré and other surgical authors of that period throw no light upon that question and furnish erroneous descriptions of the steps of the operation. Apparently they had never witnessed one of that character. (Von Gurlt.)

(2.) The records seem to warrant the statement that, about the middle of the fifteenth century a surgeon by the name of Branca, who lived in the city of Catania on the southeast coast of Sicily, devoted himself largely to the reconstruction of damaged or defective noses. At first he transplanted a flap from the forehead or cheek; but afterward his son sought to improve the method by utilizing a flap of skin taken from the arm. By this plan the disfiguring of the patient's face was avoided. The son employed the same method in repairing the lips and the ears. Pupils of the latter carried a knowledge of the method to the Bojano (Vianea or Vieneo) family in Tropea, Calabria, and from them it was transmitted, about the middle of the sixteenth century, to Tagliacozzi and eventually to the medical profession in every part of the world.

(3.) In 1581 there was published at Cracow, Galicia (formerly Poland), a book which bore the title "Przymiot" and which gave a most complete account of the disease syphilis in all its manifestations and complications. This book, in its original form, is to-day one of the greatest bibliographical rarities; but a reprint of the work was published in 1881 by the Warsaw Surgical Society. In this volume Wojciech Oczko, the personal physician and secretary of the Polish kings Stephan Bathory and Sigismund the Third, discusses other surgical topics beside syphilis. He states, for example, that Aranzio (or Arantius), who was Professor of Surgery at Bologna at the time (1569) when he frequented that medical school, was successful in making a new nose by transplanting a flap of skin from the patient's arm; and that he performed this operation without injuring the muscles of the arm, and also with perfect success as regards the creation of a straight and shapely nose. "This statement," says von Gurlt, "coming as it does from an eye-witness who was at Bologna several years before Tagliacozzi's time, furnishes satisfactory proof that rhinoplasty was successfully performed in that city several years before the