Page 140 - My FlipBook

142 SECOND PERIOD—THE MIDDLE AGES
The extraction of a tooth is only justifiable, says Gaddesden, when all
the remedies employed against odontalgia have proved useless and when,
on the other hand, the pain has its seat in the tooth itself and not in the
nerves or gums. Before undertaking the operation, however, the patient
must be prepared for it with an evacuant cure, that is, by injections and
purgatives. For the operation itself the author recommends the same
rules given by Celsus, and says, besides, that the head of the patient
ought to be held firm by an assistant. In certain cases, the extraction
can be performed, better than with the forceps, by means of an instru-
ment in the form of a lever, broad at one end, narrow and sharpened
at the other. But when a tooth is very firmly seated, its extraction is
always dangerous; therefore, in such a case, Gaddesden recommends-,
before having recourse to the operation, the use either of acrid sub-
stances, such as the milky juice of the euphorbiacea? (for example, of the
tithymal), or else of a red-hot iron; and this, for the purpose of promoting
the fall of the tooth, or of rendering it, at least, so far movable that
It can be extracted without any difficulty.
Guy de Chauliac, the greatest surgeon of the middle ages, was born
about 1300, in a little village on the confines of Auvergne, which still
preserves the name of Chaulhac; he died in 1368. This author immor-
talized his name by a work which even up to the eighteenth century
was, as it were, the official code for the teaching of surgery. Guy wrote
his Chiriirgia magna in barbarous Latin—such as was then used by the
learned; but his book was soon translated into French, Provencal, and
afterward also into Italian, English, Dutch, and Hebre^y. E. Nicaise,
who, in i8go, gave to the scientific world a very valuable new edition of
Gu\' de Chauliac,' and who made very accura e researches on all that
regards this author and his work, has succeeded in finding in the libraries
of Europe and America as many as thirty-four manuscript copies of
the High Surger? The survival of so many copies, in spite of all the
destructive agencies which have been in action during more than 500
years, is a very clear proof of the wide diffusion which this work obtained
even before the invention of printing.
Guy's work was printed for the first time in 1478, and the editions that
have been published since then in various countries are in all about 130.
1 his book is very important for our subject, since we may gather from
it very clearly the condition of dentistry in the fourteenth century; but,
on the other hand, we see from it, with equal clearness, that this branch

' La (jrande Cliirurgie de Ciuy de Chauliac, chirurgien maistre en medecine de I'Uni-
versite dc Montpellicr, composee en I'an 1363, revue et coUafionnee sur les manuscrits et
imprimes latins et fran(,-ais par K. Nicaise, i8go.
-' C)f these copies, twenty-two are written in Latin, four in French, two in Provencal, three
in Lnfilish, one in Netherlandish (Dutch), one in Italian, and one in Hebrew.