STONES IN THE HEAD. 



5*5 



to the operations of wandering quacks or mountebanks, such as 

 the pictures represent, the sebaceous cyst or the common pimple, 

 the caseous contents of which may possibly become chalky and 

 hard like a stone. There are also pimples scattered over the 

 forehead and the cranium which may be freed from their cores 

 by a stroke or two of the bistoury. Large operations on the 

 head were certainly known in those days ; for trepanation, with 

 which Hippocrates was acquainted, goes back, as any anthro- 

 pologist will tell us, to prehistoric times. But our quacks could 

 not have become skillful in such bold attempts ; and if they had 



FIG. 1. " STONES IN THE HEAD." An engraving from the picture of Pierre Brueghel le 

 Vieux, in the engravings room of the Amsterdam Museum. (Flemish school of the six- 

 teenth century.) 



only pimples to remove, there would have been no need of making 

 a triumphant display of a stone or of piles of stones. 



In his very judicious interpretation of these pictures, Dr. 

 Henry Meige concludes that they relate to operations which were 

 for the most part purely factitious and addressed to subjects of 

 disordered minds. Instead of talking of bees in their bonnets, 

 they said in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of persons a 

 little off the balance that they had a stone in their head ; and if 

 one of such unfortunates happened to recover, they said, just as 

 carelessly, that a stone had been taken out of his head. 



When such a way of talking was current with the public, 

 what is there to surprise one that the quacks of the period should 

 be on the lookout to make innocent and half-witted persons be- 

 lieve that they were masters of the surest process to cure them of 



