A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



particular stress upon the necessity of the surgeon 

 having a thorough knowledge of anatomy. He had a 

 helpmate in his wife, who was also something of a 

 surgeon, and she is credited with having first made use 

 of the magnet in removing particles of metal from the 

 eye. Hildanes tells of a certain man who had been 

 injured by a small piece of steel in the cornea, 

 which resisted all his efforts to remove it. After ob- 

 serving Hildanes' fruitless efforts for a time, it sud- 

 denly occurred to his wife to attempt to make the 

 extraction with a piece of loadstone. While the physi- 

 cian held open the two lids, his wife attempted to 

 withdraw the steel with the magnet held close to the 

 cornea, and after several efforts she was successful 

 which Hildanes enumerates as one of the advantages 

 of being a married man. 



Hildanes was particularly happy in his inventions 

 of surgical instruments, many of which were designed 

 for locating and removing the various missiles recently 

 introduced in warfare. 



The seventeenth century, which was such a flourish- 

 ing one for anatomy and physiology, was not as pro- 

 ductive of great surgeons or advances in surgery as 

 the sixteenth had been or the eighteenth was to be. 

 There was a gradual improvement all along the line, 

 however, and much of the work begun by such sur- 

 geons as Pare and Hildanes was perfected or im- 

 proved. Perhaps the most progressive surgeon of the 

 century was an Englishman, Richard Wiseman (1625- 

 1686), who, like Harvey, enjoyed royal favor, being in 

 the service of all the Stuart kings. He was the first 



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