The speculum matricis / by Alban Doran.

  • Doran, Alban H. G. (Alban Henry Griffiths), 1849-1927
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The speculum matricis / by Alban Doran. 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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    must be dilated like the vagina of women by means of the anal dilator, that is to say by means of the small diopteron. Thus, as these instructive notes remind us, the use of a bladed expansible instrument alike for the anus and vagina is recorded in the works of ancient authorities. When we turn to the middle ages, we find that Guy de Chauliac in his Grande Chirurgie ” of 1363, in writing of the extraction of the child, directs the surgeon to introduce the instrument called Speculum which is provided with a thumbscrew, and dilate the vagina as much as possible.” No doubt de Chauliac is speaking of the same instrument, the thumbscrew, instead of the winch, being a mere modification, known, as will be explained, to Pare. It will be shown that Gersdorff published a drawing of this speculum matricis in 1526, twenty-eight years before Rueff’s work appeared, and notes distinctly that it was used as an anal or vaginal dilator. The Museum of the College of Surgeons possesses, as has already been observed, a set of facsimiles of instruments found in Pompeii, from the originals now preserved in the Naples Museum, presented by the curators of the latter collection in 1886. There is a dilator not unlike certain nineteenth century instruments bearing that name and a four-bladed as well as a three-bladed speculum matricis. The four-bladed speculum differs entirely from Rueff’s in mechanism. The blades work on a frame by the mechanism seen in an artist’s easel. It probably held open the vulva after the fashion of Albucasis’ speculum, represented as the ” Figura cochleae qua aperitur os uteri” in Channing’s ”Albucasis de Chirurgia, Arabicag et Latine,” Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1778, pp. 338-9. This speculum is also figured, but hardly identical in details, as Forma vertiginis qua aperitur matrix ” in Cyrurgia parva Guidonis,” published in Venice in 1500. It is not quite clear, however, that the Roman four-bladed speculum was identical in mechanism with that figured by Albucasis and referred to by later writers.^ There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that the three-bladed Pompeian speculum is the ancestor of Rueff’s. The blades are more convex externally and become somewhat narrower towards the lower and more cylindrical portion. The upper, free ends, or points of the blades are very blunt, a great deal blunter than the blades in the Loan Collection sample and in the instruments figured by Gersdorff and Rueff. Thus the ancient Romans finished off the blades better than the Europeans of the Renaissance; as may be seen at a glance (Fig. 2) the blades in the Pompeian speculum would be much less likely to wound or irritate the parts. In one I. For information about Abn’l Kaseni Alzaliaravi, commonly called Albucasis (died about 1122), and bis numerous literary descendants, see vSiebold, “ Oescbicbte der Gebnrtsbnlfe,” vol. i, p. 2S7. There seems to be no evidence that he used the rompeian-FnefT type of speculum.
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