by Pedro Lopez de Leon, a native of Seville, and a pupil of Hidalgo de Aguero, which was first published in 1628, but of which we have only seen the second edition of 1685,* we meet with details showing the intelligent and dexterous surgeon, though with proofs, also, of what was then frequently the helplessness of the art. Among his successes he mentions the case of a woman from whom he had removed a great part of the uterus, who bore a child ten years afterwards, and who at the end of other ten years was still alive. He was accustomed, he states, in traumatic hæmorrhage to proceed by passing a needle below the vessel, and by this sole puncture, in performing which it is evident from the context that he intended the needle to remain ("quedanse alli las agujas"), he found that the flow of blood was usually arrested, even in vessels of great magnitude. "When other methods do not succeed," he continues, "this puncture is to be made in the depth of the wound, and through its means you may avoid what is directed by authors in wounds of veins or in injured arteries, who order the parts to be laid open and the vessel to be tied above and below, dividing it afterwards between the ligatures." Lopez was an enthusiastic admirer of his master, Hidalgo, and in this he was followed by another surgeon, Pedro Gago Vadilla, whose work, probably first published shortly after 1630, we have examined in its third edition,§ which is that also which has been seen by Morejon. Vadilla eulogizes Hidalgo's method in the treatment of wounds as more like a revelation from heaven than the work of man ;|| and certainly his experience in Peru, of which he relates many remarkable illustrations, abounds as singularly in proofs of how freely his fellow-denizens in Lima¶ used the stiletto and the knife, as of the happy success with which he applied the rules of his preceptor to remedy the effects of their savagery. Another writer near this time, whose treatise on Injuries of the Head we have consulted, is Christoval de Montemayor, who was one of the surgeons to both Philip II. and his successor. This work appears to have been first published in 1613, and Morejon mentions another edition in 1664, without apparently being aware of an intervening one in 1651,** which is that now before us. The author, who treats his topic generally with judgment, appears, however, to have been more liberal with the trephine than would have been sanctioned by the surgical reformer of Seville. A work on Surgery, of this period, which would scarcely have merited notice were it not that it had passed through several impressions, and has chanced to fall into our hands, is the epitome of the art by Alonso Romano.++ Appended to it is a treatise on Strictures of the Urethra, by Miguel de Leriza, who adds to his title of Surgeon that of Official of the Holy Inquisition. * Pratica y Teorica de las Apostemas en general, y Praticas de Cirugia. Folio. Calatavid, 1685. t Op. cit., lib. ii. cap. 2, p. 154. § Luz de la verdadera Cirugia. 4to. ** Medicina y Cirugia de vulneribus Capitis. Ibid., lib. ii. cap. 3, p. 160. Ibid., p. 285. 12mo. Saragoça, 1651. tt Recopilacion de toda la theorica y pratica de Cirugia. 12mo. Valencia, 1665. The phlebotomists of this period are instructed in their art by Alonso Muñoz,* blood-letter and first barber to the king, who, we find, in speaking of extraction of the teeth, is inclined to dispute the ordinary notion that the adult possesses thirty-two teeth, twentyeight being all that he had been able to discover. Two works on Veterinary Medicine which we have examined, the one published in 1629 by Baltazar Francisco Ramirez,† and the other in 1685 by Pedro Garcia Conde, afford some example of the way in which this department of the healing art was cultivated in Spain during the seventeenth century. Juan Gutierrez de Godoy, a physician of the Court, is favourably known for a work on the duty of mothers to nurse their children ;§ an obligation then lamentably neglected, and often in a way singularly repulsive to modern notions. This treatise, which we have been able to consult, was published in 1629. Our acquaintance with it entitles us to give high credit to the humanity of the writer, whose reach of thought, however, as shown in his numerous digressions, by no means generally passes beyond that of his contemporaries. We ought, perhaps, not to omit the name of Gallego de la Serna, who passed into France as physician of Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III., were it only to record the remuneration he received for his shrewdness in resisting the mischievous interference of the other physicians, during an illness of the Queen which they had pronounced desperate, but which he declared to be progressing towards recovery, and to require only to be kept from all powerfully disturbing remedies. Proving right in his prognostication, his reward, he tells us, was two thousand florins from the King, with the same amount from the Queen, and a life annuity of eight hundred florins besides, which he continued to enjoy. Gaspar Brabo de Sobremonte Ramirez, who died in 1683, at the age of upwards of seventy, was a graduate of Valladolid, where he afterwards held a chair. He was an indefatigable, and, in his day, highly esteemed writer; his collected works having appeared in five volumes folio. Of his separate publications, several of which went through numerous editions, we are directly acquainted only with his Disputatio Apologetica,' which is a defence of dogmatic or rational medicine, first published in 1669; and which has appended to it two other treatises, the one discussing the details of a series of medical cases and consultations, and the other presenting an epitome of what he terms practical medicine, but more truly of the principles of medicine, designed for the use of the student. Sobremonte was body physician to the two kings, Philip IV. and Charles II.; of the last illness of the former of whom, oc Instruccion de los Barberos Flobotomianos. 12mo. Valencia, 1621. ↑ Discurso de Albeyteria. 4to. Madrid, 1629. Verdadera Albeyteria. Folio. Madrid, 1685. Tres discursos para provar que estan obligadas a criar sus hijos a sus pechos todas las madres. 4to. Jaen, 1629. Disputatio Apologetica. Pro dogmatica medicinæ præstantia; et omnium scientiarum, et artium dignitate, ex omnigenæ literaturæ decretis. 4to. Coloniæ, 1671. curring in 1665, he gives an interesting record.* His other works chiefly related to physiology, and to the consideration of numerous practical and theoretical medical questions; to the elucidation of which, if we are to judge from what we have ourselves perused, he brought great stores of that peculiar learning, as well as singular skill in that intricate apparatus of dialectics, which appeared so attractive then, but which seem to us so vague and unprofitable now. In the volume before us, many points in medical ethics and polity, however, are treated in a way to excite and reward curiosity. A name of greater general distinction in medicine than that of the, in so far, deservedly fortunate Gallego de la Serna, or even than Sobremonte, was that of Gaspar Caldera de Heredia, a graduate of Salamanca, and resident up to the time of his death as a physician in Seville. He was the contemporary and personal intimate of the learned bibliographer Antonio, who assigns this as a reason, along with the desire not to do violence to his friend's modesty, for desisting from extending to him what would have been otherwise his due measure of praise. His principal work, to the merit of which we can speak from a former direct acquaintance, now renewed for our present purpose, is his Tribunal Medicum, Magicum, et Politicum,' published in folio at Leyden in 1658. We may single out, as worthy of notice in the first part of this remarkable performance, the discussions on prognosis, the comments on tracheotomy, those on tubercle of the lung, the treatise on the plague, and that, "utilis et jucundus," on the variety of drinks, where we find, among the rest, an account of a tippling-house then open night and day in Madrid, known, from the variety of its potations, as "the house of the hundred wines" (la casa de los cien vinos). In the second part, or the Tribunal MedicoMagicum,' we find a contrast to the many excellences of the portion that precedes, in the too frequent surrender of the author to a belief in the grossest follies and superstitions of his age. In the 'Tribunal Politicum' the author again rises in our estimation: but the volume unfortunately closes with a new tribute to fanaticism, in the shape of a discussion of the question whether the Kings of Castile, by hereditary descent, are endowed with the power to cure the possessed and to cast out devils; which knotty point, after a careful investigation of all the probabilities, and a demand for further proofs, he considerately reserves as a topic for his greater leisure, without hazarding an absolute denial, as is alleged in his favour by Morejon. Caldera was born towards the close of the sixteenth century, and survived to a ripe age. A Benedictine monk, Fr. Estevan de Villa, who officiated as apothecary to the Hospital of St. John, at Burgos, distinguished himself about this time as a pharmaceutist. A perusal of his treatise on Medicinal Plants,§ with the annexed formulary, leads us to assign to it a creditable place among the similar works of this era. A taxation of the prices of drugs and medicaments in Spain, issued by Royal authority in * Op. cit., p. 240. Bibl. Hisp. Nova., tom. i. p. 520. 1680, happens to be bound up with the copy which we have examined, to which it constitutes an interesting, though not strictly a contemporaneous appendage, full of curious and suggestive particulars. We have also seen, by this writer, the lives of the so-called twelve princes of medicine, a series of concise biographies which appeared at Burgos in 1647. We leave to Miguel Vilar, styled in his day "the second Esculapius in his profession, the first Apollo in learning, the honour of Valencia his country, and the admiration of strangers," and who was for long a professor of anatomy and dean of faculty in his university, all the renown which belongs to him from this announcement. A more substantially acquired reputation was that of Pedro Miguel de Heredia, a native and graduate of Alcalá, whose works, published posthumously in 1665, may still be consulted with interest. Another graduate of Alcalá, who enjoyed great reputation from his writings, was Juan de la Torre y Balcarçel, a native of Hillin, in Murcia. His principal treatise, the first edition of which is now lying before us, was his ' Compendium of the Theory and Practice of Medicine,'* of which at least two other editions appeared afterwards. His remarks in this work on medical ethics, whether as relating to the physician or the patient, deserve attention, partly in themselves, but still more as illustrative of the conditions of the period. He mentions the case of a nun at Ubeda, who, suffering from prolapsus uteri, was expelled from the convent and forced to wear the dress of a man; and of another nun in Cadiz, similarly afflicted, from whom Sebastian de Antequera, a surgeon, removed the uterus and its ligaments with success, the patient recovering in twenty days. We have examined a treatise by Juan Nieto de Valcarcel, a native of Cordova, descriptive of a febrile epidemic which occurred in 1684, and have been much gratified by its prevalent good sense, and by the clearness and liveliness of its style. We have also consulted a treatise by Juan de Cabriada, ¶ the object of which is to claim regard for the then more recent advances in medicine, in comparison with what had been received from the ancients, though not with the design of depreciating the latter, a task which he has executed with an independence of judgment not common in his time. If, in the greater part of the seventeenth century, it is only rarely that we encounter any name of real merit to cheer us amid the general gloom of a science stooping feebly to its degradation beneath the puerilities of a baseless and aimless sophistry, it is still to find, towards the close of that century, and in the commencement of that which followed, that the deterioration had changed only a few of its features, while throwing off none of its essential imperfections. We gladly escape in part, though by no Espejo de la Philosophia, y Compendio de toda la Medicina Theorica y Pratica. Folio. Amberes, 1668. + Op. cit., p. 184. Ibid., p. 72. § Ibid., p. 76. Disputa Epidemica. 4to. Valencia, 1685. Carta Filosofica, Medico-Chemica, en que se demuestra, que de los tiempos, y experiencias se han aprendido los majores remedios contra las Enfermedades. Madrid, 1686. 4to. means totally, from the superstitious dedications with which many treatises open in the former division of the period, and from the abject, though not needless deprecation of the censure and vengeance of the Inquisition with which they frequently close; but it is not, nevertheless, to encounter immediately greater manliness and justness of thought in the times which we approach. There was the still near reflection of a real glory at the one era, which survived only as a recollection in the other; though men, pointing to their ancient fame, continued to vaunt as an adornment what they had no longer energy enough to follow as an example. Thus the Spaniard spoke then, in the midst of his political and mental enthralment, as he speaks too habitually even now, when we trust he has better prospects before him, with that tetchy arrogance natural to those who, the more they feel insecure in their claims, are ever the more jealous in exacting an acknowledgment of them. When the individuals of a nation complacently praise themselves and each other, and boast the old perfection of the institutions with which they are connected, or in which they have an interest, while they are weakly impatient of all challenge from without, certain it is that such a nation is conscious of the hollowness of its pretensions, and that such institutions are tottering to their decline; for in matters of science, dependent as that is on extension and progress, even to be content is to recede. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were still truly many Spanish medical writers, but their trivialities constituted no true medical literature. It was towards the middle of this century that a sounder spirit began to insinuate itself into the medical science of the Peninsula, characterized by the reappearance of a greater activity of observation, and more just and moderate habits of reflection. Not that the progress of the Spaniards was then in any degree equal to that of the more advanced of other European countries; for the burden, rather than the incitement, of their former renown, rendering them prone to rest on their old memories, made them proportionately slow to accept new doctrines and discoveries. Though this impassiveness may have saved them from a few fluctuations in opinion, and a few caprices in practice, still the want of movement by which it was accompanied was generally little favourable to the growth of knowledge; for it is by the collision of opinions that we ultimately elicit the truth, however prejudicial it may often be to receive at first, too confidently and rashly, doctrines which a riper examination may expose as chimeras, or however hurtful be that innovation which, merely as innovation, leads so many into error, to throw them back into scepticism. No new code of theoretical medicine, justly so designated, arose at this period in Spain; and at no portion of it did any of those bodies of doctriue, emanating from the schools of Leyden, Edinburgh, Montpelier, and Vienna, which had so deep an influence elsewhere, hold an extensive sway throughout the Peninsula, though each of them had successively its partisaus. But with those among whom real science lies thus in lethargy, there is always the greater aptitude for the growth and the fostering of pseudoscience. |