Ligations of the left subclavian artery in its first portion / by William S. Halsted.

  • Halsted, William, 1852-1922.
Date:
[between 1900 and 1999]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ligations of the left subclavian artery in its first portion / by William S. Halsted. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Historical Survey ‘^^Eational surgery was one of the gifts of the Greeks, but in the 800 years between Hippocrates and Oribasius few names have survived specially associated with this branch of medicine. Who among us off-hand could recall more than two or three in addition to Hippocrates and Galen ? Yet in this period scores of important schools flourished with great teachers of surgery, men honoured in their generation and the glory of their times. As one reads the partial list in Haller’s Bibliotheca Chirurgica and scans the few golden remains of their writ¬ ings fortunately preserved by encyclopaedists such as Oribasius and Paul of H]gina, the truth of Sir Thomas Browne’s remarks comes home: ^ Who knows whether the best of men be known, whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time ? ’ Two of these comparatively unknown men created the surgery of arteries, Eufus of Ephesus and Antyllus, the Cosmas and Damien of Greek surgery.* RUFUS OP EPHESUS ‘^^To generations of practitioners unworthy to hand him ligatures Eufus of Ephesus (Eeign of Trajan, early part of second century A. D.) was known by the ^ pilulae Euffi,’ Hhe pills I would not be without ’—pilulae sine quibus esse nolo ’—still in the British Pharmacopoeia as the pill of aloes and myrrh. In the brilliant Ionian profession of the early days of our era Eufus doubtless had predecessors and teachers, but he stands out a strong, clear figure, a great magister chirurgiae,’ a title justly earned by his remarkable con¬ tribution to the surgery of haemostasis. We know it only through a section in Aetius, a sixth-century physician, f Hothing is lacking in a description, which might be transferred to any modern textbook—• digital compression, styptics, the cautery, torsion, and the ligature— only I am sorry not to find, as is sometimes said, a description sug¬ gestive of arterio-venous aneurysm, though he speaks of the possibility of traumatic aneurysm. Through the Arabians the name of Eufus was on the lips of every mediaeval physician, and we find him among the favorites of Chaucer’s well-read Doctor. In one of the earliest and most beautiful of medical manuscripts, the famous Juliana Anicia Dioscorides (A. D. 525), of the Vienna Library, he is figured with Galen, Hippocrates, and others. * “ These practitioners, who became the Christian saints of surgery, suffered martyrdom in Cilicia in the third century. In their Western Mother Church, on the Roman Forum, I have seen the little parcel said to contain the instruments with which they performed the most famous opera¬ tion in hagiological surgery, substitution of the healthy thigh of a just- dead man for one that was gangrenous.” f “ Tetrabiblos, lib. xiv, cap. 51.”