514 POPULAB SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



STONES IN THE HEAD. 



By Dk. a. CARTAZ. 



IN all times painters have been fond of reproducing scenes of 

 medical life, but the tendency has never been more marked 

 than it was in the middle ages. Taking to the very life the 

 oddest-seeming subjects, they have presented with the hands of 

 masters the realistic pictures of the most various nervous troubles 

 and pathological afflictions. On celebrated canvases may be seen, 

 in attitudes of the most scrupulous exactness, the likenesses of 

 great nervous affections like hysteria, malformations, clubfoot, 

 and rickets. The great book of Charcot and Richer, Les 

 demoniaques et les malades dans I'art (Demoniacs and Invalids in 

 Art), has brought out into the light the large number of ancient 

 works in which scenes of that kind are to be found. Yet they 

 deal with only one special point in pathology. 



A gentleman whose artistic erudition is equal to his medical 

 knowledge. Dr. Henry Meige, has in his turn been gleaning in a 

 rich field for observations, and has given us, in a series of remark- 

 able studies in the New Iconography of the Salpetriere, a saga- 

 cious and interesting critical estimate of the " painters of medi- 

 cine." A recent memoir of his concerns pictures illustrating 

 operations on the head. 



We find these scenes of medical life most frequently repro- 

 duced, whether in a realistic or a satirical fashion, in the Flemish 

 and Dutch schools. There are pictures giving a vivid image of 

 a woman dying of hydropsy of the heart, as in Gerard Dow's 

 celebrated canvas in the Louvre ; of a young victim of anaemia, 

 as in " The Patient " of Van Hoogstraaten, at Amsterdam ; of a 

 hysterical sufferer, as in "The Possessed*' of Rubens, etc. But 

 these pictures are most frequently figures of charlatans and really 

 caricatures ; subjects were abundant, for in that day, as in our 

 own time, quacks and tooth-pullers were not idle. As in our 

 fairs and parades, street operators and doctors and quacks of all 

 sorts made display of their knowledge in public, and their ad- 

 dress was not lacking in wit or warmth. Such scenes as these the 

 Flemish painters strove especially to represent, castigating the 

 quacks with their satirical pencils. 



The pictures which we present to our readers repeat scenes 

 from the operations for stone in the head. It may be asked. 

 What was the operation which the painter intended to ridicule ? 

 There exist on the hairy part of the skin no such calculous prod- 

 ucts as are found in the canals of some of the glands or in some 

 of the reservoirs of the organism, like the biliary vesicle or the 

 bladder. We only know as tumors that might lend themselves 



