Sect. IV.] Surge?y and Obstetrics. 3G9 



^nated Surgery. At the close of the seventeenth 

 century this art had considerably emerged from the 

 low state in which all preceding ages had left it. 

 Many respectable writers had appeared in the 

 course of that century, whose exertions to improve 

 the practice of surgery, and to diifuse the knowledge 

 of such improvements, were attended with so much 

 success as to ren(]er the ])rogress of it compara- 

 tively rapid at the commencement of tlie eighteenth 

 century. 



It will be easy to perceive that the nmnerous 

 improvements in other branches of medicine, which 

 are detailed in the preceding parts of this chapter, 

 must have greatly . advanced the progress of sur- 

 gery. Every step in the cultivation of anatomy 

 and the theory and practice of physic confers some 

 advantage on medical or operative surger}'. Tlie 

 improved state of the m.echanic arts has likewise 

 served to divest it of much of that useless machinery 

 with which it was formerly encumbered, to retain 

 only what appears to rest on the basis of experi- 

 ence, and to aid ingenuity in supplying many im- 

 portant deficiencies. Menee, the surgery of the 

 eighteenth century may not only boast a more in- 

 timate acquaintance with the structure and func- 

 tions of the human body, and with the fundamental 

 principles of diseases, but likewise a superior sim- 

 plicity, neat ness, ease, and expedition, in the per- 

 formance of operations. 



Early in the century whicii forms the sul^ject of 

 this retrospect, Laurence Heister, professor of sur- 

 gery in the university of Helmstadt, published his 

 System of Surgery, m Inch continued till about fif- 

 teen years ago to be the onlv tohTublv <N>inpf(4«'' 



Vv^L. I. '•' li 



