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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



their terrible infirmity ? Do we not see in our own time patients 

 persuaded that a snake is devouring their insides, that their 

 skull is bored with a gimlet ? Do we not see simple maniacs 

 possessed by like ideas ? Are there not neurasthenics who have 

 a helmet weighing upon their head and compressing their brain ? 



Fig. 2." Stones in the Head." Picture by Jan Steen. Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam. 



Have not hysterics their famous nail ? And would not all these 

 people of those times, less cultivated than in our time, however 

 high their position may have been, be willing, in the paroxysms 

 of their suffering, to submit to any operation that might be sug- 

 gested in order to be delivered permanently ? It was so formerly, 

 and more especially in the era when sorcery had lost none of its 

 prestige. It therefore seems logical to us to regard these opera- 

 tions, as Dr. Meige does, as pure deceptions of quacks ; further- 

 more, we have the pictures to prove this. 



Let us look, for example, at the painting of Brueghel le Vieux, 

 in the Amsterdam Museum (Fig. 1). We are in a busy doctor's 

 shop, where operations are performed without truce or mercy. 

 Three surgeons are not too many to attend to the throng of pa- 

 tients. One rustic, already operated upon, looks slyly at his neigh- 

 bor who is howling with pain and pushes away the assistants, 

 while the operator is preparing, with formidable-looking forceps 

 in his hands, to extract the troublesome stone. On the right, an- 

 other operator, his head covered with a queer-looking long cap, is 

 opening the incision through which deliverance is to come. In 

 the background, an assistant is practicing upon a corpulent old 

 fellow, while a fourth is trying to retain an unfortunate who is 



