After the time of Paulus of Ægina the art of surgery slept for five hundred years; imitators of the ancient masters and compilers of their works alone remained to prove that it was still alive, but no progress was made. The religious orders employed the best methods they knew for the relief of physical suffering, but naturally it was not their work to perfect the healing art. In the Middle Ages, when so much of the medical and surgical practice was in the hands of the monks, particularly of the Benedictine order, many abuses crept in; and at last the practice of surgery by the clergy was forbidden in 1163 by the Council of Tours. The office of royal physician in the Frankish court in the sixth century was not unattended with risk. When Austrigildis, wife of King Guntram, died of the pestilence in the year 580, she expressed in her last moments a pious desire that her doctors, Nicolaus and Donatus, should be put to death for not having saved her; and her husband, feeling it incumbent upon him to carry out her wishes, had them duly executed.[537] ANCIENT SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS. Bramhilla, surgeon to Francis II. of Austria, said that surgical instruments were invented by Tubal Cain, because the Bible says he was “the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.” The saw is a tool of great antiquity. Pliny attributes its invention to Dædalus, or to his nephew Perdix, who was also called Talos; he was supposed to have imitated it from the jaw of a serpent, with which he had been able to cut a piece of wood. The invention of forceps was attributed to Vulcan and the Cyclopes. When used for extracting teeth, the Greeks called them ὀδοντάγρα; for extracting arrow-heads and other weapons from the wounded in battle, the particular form employed was called ἀρδιοθήρα. In the collection of domestic objects discovered by M. Petrie in the Egyptian ruins of Kahun, flint saws close upon 5,000 years old may be seen.[538] Pincers and tweezers are made by the natives of Timor-laut from the bamboo; they are used for pulling out the hair from the face. The natives of the Darling River, New South Wales, use fine bone needles for boring through the septum of the nose. The book on _Wounds of the Head_ is admitted by the best critics to be a genuine work of Hippocrates. We find in that treatise that he used the trepan, as he speaks of a σμικρὸν τρύπανον, a _small trepan_. There must also have been a larger one, a πρίων, or _saw_, which had a περίοδος, or _circular_ motion, and which was probably the trephine, and a πρίων χαρακτός, or _jagged saw_, which is held to be the _trepan_; and he gives instructions to the operator to withdraw the instrument frequently and cool both it and the bone with cold water, and to exercise all vigilance not to wound the living membrane.[539]