Had it not been for the works of Celsus, many operations of ancient surgery would have remained to us undescribed. He writes at length on bleeding, and describes the double ligation (or tying) of bleeding vessels, and the division of the vessels between the ligatures: an operation which the defenders of experiments on animals claim to have been discovered by vivisection. His method of amputation in gangrene by a single circular cut was followed down to the seventeenth century. He describes the process of catheterization, operations for goitre (or Derbyshire neck), the resection of the ribs, the use of enemas, and artificial feeding by them, an operation for cataract, ear diseases which are curable by the use of the ear syringe, extraction of teeth by forceps, fastening loose teeth by means of gold wire, and bursting hollow teeth by peppercorns pressed into them. He describes many of the most difficult subjects of operative midwifery, and discriminates in various mental diseases. Sleep must be induced, he says, in cases of insanity, by narcotics, if it is absent. He treats eye diseases with mild lotions and salves, and is the first writer to distinguish hallucinations of vision. He copies from Asclepiades his valuable rules of diet and simple methods of treatment, and from Hippocrates his methods of recognising the signs of diseases and their prognosis. (I am indebted to the great work of Dr. Hermann Baas[467] for much of the above digest of the writings of Celsus.) At the time when Celsus described the practice of medicine in Europe, bleeding was practised more freely than was the custom in the days of the great Greek physicians. The Romans went far beyond these. “It is not,” said Celsus, “a new thing to let blood from the veins, but it is new that there is scarcely any malady in which blood is not drawn. Formerly they bled young men, and women who were not pregnant, but it had not been seen till our days that children, pregnant women, and old men were bled.” And it would seem that already doctors had begun to bleed in almost every case, in every time of life, with or without reason, the unfortunate people who were under their care. They bled for high fever, when the body was flushed and the veins too full of blood; and they bled in cachexia and anæmia, when they had not enough blood, but were full of “ill humours.” They bled in pleurisy and pneumonia, and they bled in paralysis, and cases where there was severe pain.