MEDICINE 



prolonging human life, so the fame of his Italian con- 

 temporary, Caspar Tagliacozzi (1545-1599), rests upon 

 his operation for increasing human comfort and 

 happiness by restoring amputated noses. At the 

 time in which he lived amputation of the nose was 

 very common, partly from disease, but also because a 

 certain pope had fixed the amputation of that member 

 as the penalty for larceny. Tagliacozzi probably 

 borrowed his operation from the East ; but he was the 

 first Western surgeon to perform it and describe it. 

 So great was the fame of his operations that patients 

 flocked to him from all over Europe, and each "went 

 away with as many noses as he liked." Naturally, the 

 man who directed his efforts to restoring structures 

 that had been removed by order of the Church was 

 regarded in the light of a heretic by many theologians ; 

 and though he succeeded in cheating the stake or 

 dungeon, and died a natural death, his body was 

 finally cast out of the church in which it had been 

 buried. 



In the sixteenth century Germany produced a sur- 

 geon, Fabricius Hildanes (1560-1639), whose work 

 compares favorably with that of Pare, and whose name 

 would undoubtedly have been much better known 

 had not the circumstances of the time in which he 

 lived tended to obscure his merits. The blind follow- 

 ers of Paracelsus could see nothing outside the pale of 

 their master's teachings, and the disastrous Thirty 

 Years' War tended to obscure and retard all scientific 

 advances in Germany. Unlike many of his fellow- 

 surgeons, Hildanes was well versed in Latin and Greek ; 

 and, contrary to the teachings of Paracelsus, he laid 



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