Medical paleography / by George M. Gould.

  • Gould, George Milbrey, 1848-1922.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical paleography / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    3^. I Reprinted from The Philadelphia Monthly Medical Journal, December, 1899.] MEDICAL PALEOGRAPHY. By GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D., of Philadelphia. Medicine is a forward-looking, not a backward- looking science, and hence the study of the origins and evolution of our guild and of its beliefs and customs are little thought of by our earnest members. Our indif- ference to the history of medicine was curiously and strikingly brought home to me recently, when I be- gan hunting for data concerning the embryology of the signs used every day by physicians in prescrip- tion-writing. I discovered that as the peasant does not know what his “bow and scrape” mean, evolu- tionally-speaking,^ and as the young mother does not understand why she dresses her infant in a skirt two or three feet longer than the baby itself,^ so the • physician has no suspicion of the origins of the signs used every day for drams, ounces, scruples, etc. After consulting two or three dozen cyclopedias, diction- aries, and technical handbooks, I found that nobody knew, and that these signs are written in the United States a million or several million times every day, and by highly educated men without the slightest suspicion or comprehension of their history.® Their origin can be understood only by a general comprehension of the principal facts of the history of punctuation and of general paleography. As to general paleography, the best encyclopedias contain epitomes of the subject which need not be repro- duced here, except, perhaps, to mention the roles played, (i) by the expensiveness of material upon ' Spencer explains them as tlie initial movements of the captive, throwine- himself under the conqueror's feet. “ The mother’s skirt used for the newcomer, until this became a universal custom. ’ I thought I should find the revelation of the mystery in a book I stumbled upon on medical symbolism, but it does not even mention the existence of the