Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/600

 uncommon operation, and was almost always performed by itinerant lithotomists ("inciseurs"). The Collots had, for many years, possessed almost a monopoly of this business. Laurent Collot, who was the first one of the family to engage in the work, was Royal Lithotomist in 1556, and handed down to his son all the knowledge on this subject which he had acquired through long experience. François Tolet was another of these popular lithotomists who flourished in Paris during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He died in 1724 at the age of seventy-seven. His treatise on lithotomy, which was published in Paris in 1681, and subsequently passed through several editions, is said by Dezeimeris to contain the records of a large number of his own cases and to show clearly that he was a surgeon of sound judgment. No better treatise on this subject, he adds, was published during that period of the history of medicine.

In addition to those whom I have just mentioned there were two French monks who gained wide celebrity as operators for stone in the bladder, viz., Frère Jacques de Beaulieu and Frère Côme. The last-named belongs to the early part of the eighteenth century, and should therefore—in accordance with the plan which I have been following—not receive consideration in the present account; but, in view of the fact that these are the only two monks who, during the Renaissance and the period immediately following, gained conspicuous credit for the honorable and efficient service which they rendered, not merely to the science of medicine but also to the cause of humanity, I believe that I cannot do better than to place the two sketches together as if they both belonged strictly to one and the same period of time.

(a) Frère Jacques—or Brother James, who was born in 1561 at the village of Létendonne, near Lons-le-Saulnier, Central France,—learned the art of operating for stone in the bladder from an Italian surgeon named Paulony, and acted as his assistant or associate up to the time when he became a monk of the Order of Saint Francis—that is, of that branch of the Order which had its chapter house at