Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/572

 needle, and point or end blunt or round, that it offend not in the going in of it, made fit to draw a Flammula, or a pece of fine lawne or linnen cloth through the body or member that is wounded." "As for stitching quils and other instruments, that a Surgeon ought always to carry about him, I leave unspoken of."

In praise of one of the plasters enumerated in the list, Clowes narrates the following incident which occurred near Arnheim in the Netherlands: "A horseman was wounded with a pike neere the middle of his right thigh; the weapon so passing upwards that by good fortune it rested upon the os pubis, otherwise he had been slaine." As the first step in the treatment, the copious bleeding was arrested; after which warm oleum hyperici [oil of St. John's wort] was injected into the wound, then a short tent was introduced, and the sticking plaster was applied on the outside. "Thus he was cured in fourteene days, and so was ready to serve in the field again."

John Woodall.—John Woodall or Woodhall was born in England about 1569, and was sent as a military surgeon to France by Queen Elizabeth with the troops which Her Majesty placed at the disposal of the French King, Henry the Fourth. After his return to England, Woodall was made a surgeon of St. Bartholomew's Hospital and also Surgeon-General of the East India Company. He was already at that time a member of the Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Woodall must have had a very extensive experience in the practice of surgery, for he states that he had performed the operation of amputation of a limb more than one hundred times. The date of his death is not known.

Von Gurlt calls attention to the fact that the first notice printed in English of Ambroise Paré's method of ligating blood-vessels after an amputation is to be found in the treatise written by John Woodall and published in London in 1639, under the title: "The Surgeon's Mate, or Military and Domestic Surgery." As the first edition of this book, which was published in 1617, says nothing about Paré's method, it seems permissible to infer that the news of this