On an unpublished English anatomical treatise of the fourteenth century, and its relation to the Anatomy of Thomas Vicary / by J.F. Payne.

  • Joseph Frank Payne
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On an unpublished English anatomical treatise of the fourteenth century, and its relation to the Anatomy of Thomas Vicary / by J.F. Payne. 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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    6 This arrangement is evidently unusual, and therefore the agreement of our author is very significant. Moreover, there are a number of passages in which our MS. agrees verbally with the descriptions of Mondeville. The quotations from Galen, Aristotle, and other authors are in many cases iden- tical. , , We must conclude, then, that the debt of our author to Mondeville is very great, ^’eater even than is accounted for by the numerous passages in which he quotes him by name. Among other passages I have mentioned our author’s curious etymology of Anatomy, which is identical with that of Mondeville. His quotation in the paper from the (apocryphal) work of Galen (De Morbo et Accidente) is also given by Mondeville. His account of the necessary qualifications and means of a surgeon, though partly that of Lanfrank, is partly taken from Mondeville. Finally, we may say that our MS. is founded almost entirely on the works of Lanfrank and Mondeville. There is no allu- sion to Guy de Chauliac or any other contemporary, though other older writers are quoted. The materials borrowed from Lanfrank and Mondeville were not original in those writers. They formed part of the common stock of anatomical tradition which was drawn upon in these ages from Arabian sources, especially from Avicenna, but which the Arabs derived from the Greeks, chiefly from Galen, partly from Aristotle. In the process of handing down nothing of importance was added. In neither of the writers here spoken of is there any reference to the contemporary Mondini, or Mundinus, who lived from about 1275 to 1327, and is usually regarded as the restorer of anatomy in mediaeval Europe. I must now speak of these features of our manuscript which show that the writer, though a compiler, had a distinct in- dividuality. It appears that he practised in London. Speak- ing of the inefficacy of operation on cancer of the breast or other parts, he says: “And furthermore to speak of this sikenes in woman’s pappes, there was a worschipful riche woman in London in my tyme, the whiche had such a canker in her pappe, to whom weren clepid the most discrete worcheris of the Cyte, both offisik and surgerie, among whom I was present, and worching in the same cause But I seie surely evermore the malice encreside from day to day, and for al that we myghten do the syknesse was so fervent that it profitid ful litil to the patient, so that not a- genstondynge al our craft and kunnynge at the laste it is woundid and so the woman diede withynne sliort tyme aftir. In another place he refei’S to a method of exti-acting arrow heads froin a wound which was oftentimes proved of a knight yclepid Sir Richard Baskerville. The method was this: “ First it is necessarie that you and also the patient to be dene shryven, and thenne seie three Paternoster and three Ave_ in worschipe of the Trinite, and either seie ‘ In nomine patris, etc., adjure te per Deum vivum et per agios et i>er askiros [?] ut exeas inde,’ and thenne putte therto tbi two medicynable fyngers unto thei touch that yi-en and it schal lightly come out, fibr this medicyne hath oftentymes be proved of a knyght, yclepid Sir Richard Baskeiwille.’' Speaking of the number of bones in the skull, which wa.s a disputed question, he says: “ But though it so be that we have