Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/49

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APPENDIX.
41

clined all remuneration. It is probable that the mystery attached to them added much to their fame, and that they engaged in the attendance of the sick either to expiate crime, or to gain a high place in a world of recompense.

We can faintly conceive the veneration paid in an age of superstition to men whose lives were devoted without fee or reward to the diffusion of health, “de plaisir des autres plaisirs,” among their fellow-mortals.

Note E.—See “Recherches critiques et historiques sur Porigine, sur les divers états, et sur les progrés de la Chirurgie en France” (Paris, 1744); also a neat historical and argumentative statement of the whole subject in Dr. John Thomson’s introduction to his valuable Lectures on Inflammation. (Edinburgh, 1813.)

Note F.—“At length St. Louis, thinking the surgeons deserving of more respect than merely to be considered as the scholars and underlings of the physicians, formed them into a college, or confrérie, about the year 1268, in honour of St. Cosme and St. Damien; and in the church consecrated to these saints, the surgeons for several centuries after were obliged to attend the first Monday of every month, after Divine service, to dress the wounded and lame poor gratis.

“In this manner arose the two classes of surgeons in Italy and France, which have in a greater or less degree existed ever since in most countries of Europe: those who had had a regular education in the school of medicine, and occasionally practised as physicians, and those who without any academical education were originally employed as the servants of the priests, being in fact barbers.” See Observations in Defence of a Bill by Mr. Chevalier: London, 1797.

Note G.—I have taken some pains to ascertain if there was any foundation for the tradition which has associated the name of Titian with the magnificent plates which adorn Vesalius’s