Biology -- Greece -- History; Medicine, Greek and Roman
Returning to the Hippocratic collection, the purely surgical treatises
will be found no less remarkable than those of clinical observation.
A very able surgeon, Francis Adams (1796-1861), who was eminent as a
Greek scholar, gave it as his opinion in the middle of the nineteenth
century that no systematic writer on surgery up to his time had given
so good and so complete an account of certain dislocations, notably of
the hip-joint, as that to be found in the Hippocratic collection. Some
types of injury to the hip, as described in the Hippocratic writings,
were certainly otherwise quite inadequately known until described
by Sir Astley Cooper (1768-1841), himself a peculiarly Hippocratic
character.[122] The verdict of Adams was probably just, though since
his time the surgery of dislocations, aided especially by X-rays,
has been enabled to pass very definitely beyond the Hippocratic
position. Admirable, too, is the Hippocratic description of dislocation
of the shoulder and of the jaw. In dislocation of hip, shoulder, or
jaw, as in most similar lesions, there is considerable deformity
produced. The nature and meaning of this deformity is described with
remarkable exactness by the Hippocratic writer, who also sets forth
the resulting disability. The principles and indeed the very details
of treatment in these cases are, save for the use of an anaesthetic,
practically identical with those of the present day. The processes are
unfortunately not suitable for detailed quotation and description here,
but they are of special interest since a graphic record of them has
come down to us. There exists in the Laurentian Library at Florence
a ninth century Greek surgical manuscript which contains figures of
surgeons reducing the dislocations in question. There is good reason to
suppose that these miniatures are copied from figures first prepared
in pre-Christian times many centuries earlier, and we may here see the
actual processes of reduction of such fractures, as conducted by a
surgeon of the direct Hippocratic tradition[123] (see Figs. 3, 4).
[122] Astley Paston Cooper, _Treatise on Dislocations and Fractures of
the Joints_, London, 1822, and _Observations on Fractures of the Neck
and the Thighbone_, &c., London, 1823.
[123] This famous manuscript is known as Laurentian, Plutarch 74, 7,
and its figures have been reproduced by H. Schöne, _Apollonius von
Kitium_, Leipzig, 1896.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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