Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/530

 city, under the guidance of his uncle, Bartolommeo Maggi, and then afterward went to Padua, where he may possibly have been one of Vesalius' pupils. In 1548 he made, at Padua, his first anatomical discovery—that of the ''musculus levator palpebrae superioris''. Before he was twenty-seven years old he was chosen Professor of Medicine, Surgery and Anatomy in the University of Bologna, and he filled the position with distinction up to the time of his death on April 7, 1589—i.e., during a period of thirty-three years.

The part taken by Aranzio in the advancement of surgery was apparently of small importance. He succeeded, it is true (see remarks on page 479), in reviving the interest of contemporary surgeons in the possibility of restoring damaged parts of the human face by means of flaps taken from the patient's arm. But I have not been able to discover that he made any other material contributions to this department of the science of medicine. It is possible, however, that his plan of illuminating the interior of the nose and of operating upon nasal polypi may possess some measure of originality; but I do not feel competent to decide this question. As regards the procedure just referred to, it may be stated briefly that Aranzio was in the habit, when operating within the nasal cavity, of using by preference, for illuminating purposes, the direct rays of the sun, which were allowed to enter the room through a slit or hole in the wooden window blind; and, when sunlight was not available, he used as a source of light the rays emanating from a lighted wax candle. In the latter case he increased the brilliancy of the illumination by interposing between the flame of the candle and the illuminated field, a glass globe filled with water,—an idea which probably originated with the goldsmiths or the shoemakers. The employment of light reflected from a concave mirror supplanted this method somewhere about the year 1866.

In Italy, during the sixteenth century, there were several surgeons—uneducated empirics—who contributed not a little to our knowledge of the radical cure of hernia; and of this number the members of the Norsa family (from Norsa, a small town in the district of Naples) were