Surgical Instruments in Greek and Roman TimesMilne, John Stewart
History
Surgical Instruments in Greek and Roman Times
Milne, John Stewart
Surgery -- History; Surgical instruments and apparatus
'Finally there are cases of children that are dead when they are born,
how so unless they have also lived? For who are dead unless they have
previously been alive? And yet, an infant is sometimes by an act of
necessary cruelty destroyed when yet in the womb, when owing to an
oblique presentation at birth delivery is made impossible and the
child would cause the death of the mother unless it were doomed itself
to die. And accordingly there is among the appliances of medical men
an instrument by which the private parts are dilated with a priapiscus
worked by a screw, and also a ring-knife whereby the limbs are cut off
in the womb with judicious care, and a blunt hook by which the whole
mass is extracted and a violent form of delivery in this way effected.
There is also a bronze stylet with which a secret death is inflicted;
they call it the ἐμβρυοσφάκτης (_foeticide_) from its use in
infanticide, as being fatal to a living infant. Hippocrates had this
(instrument), Asclepiades and Erasistratus, and of the ancients also
Herophilus the anatomist, and Soranus, a man of gentler character.
Who, being assured that a living thing had been conceived, mercifully
judged that an unfortunate infant of this sort should be destroyed
before birth to save it from being mangled alive.'
We have here apparently a different instrument from the embryotome, which
we saw was a form of knife. This is a pointed spike-shaped instrument. It
must have had much the shape of one of the huge bodkins in the Naples
Museum (Pl. LI, fig. 1).
_Apparatus for fumigating the Uterus and Vagina._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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