Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/546

 In Franco's day the belief was widely prevalent that there were remedies which possessed the power of dissolving a cystic calculus. His own opinion in regard to this matter is expressed in the following words: "I am astonished that there should be many men who do not hesitate to undertake the disintegration and pulverization of a stone in the bladder by the employment of remedies which are either to be administered by the mouth or to be injected per urethram into that organ." He adds that a remedy strong enough to dissolve even the softer stones would become so changed and weakened in passing through the various organs which it must traverse on its journey from the mouth to the bladder that it could not possibly produce the desired effect; nor could a chemical solution strong enough to dissolve such a calculus be injected into the bladder by way of the urethra without either causing inflammation and ulceration of the walls of that organ or promptly exciting muscular contraction that would effectively expel the solution.

This seems to be an appropriate place in which to state that lithotrity was practiced at an earlier date by Antonio Beniveni (1440-1502), a Florentine physician whose writings reveal him to have been a man of a very practical and unprejudiced type of mind, a very clear writer, and a practitioner of wide experience. He also deserves credit for having been the first surgeon to revive the operation of tracheotomy, a procedure which was carried out by Antyllus fourteen centuries earlier, but which appears to have been forgotten during this long interval. He saved a patient's life by means of the operation.

The date of Franco's death is not known.