with cotton. Then fill the cannula with oil or some other suitable fluid, introduce into one end the stylet armed with cotton, and push it onward until the liquid enters the ear.
Edouard Nicaise, commenting on these words in his
version of Guy de Chauliac's La Grande Chirurgie (page
690), says that they constitute the first reference, thus far
discovered in medical literature, to the use of the instrument
known as a syringe.
Avenzoar.—Avenzoar was born in Seville, in the southern part of Spain, during the latter part of the eleventh century. The exact date is not known. His father was a physician of some distinction, and his son also attained considerable eminence in the same profession. According to Neuburger, Avenzoar died, at an advanced age, in 1162 A. D., and was buried in Seville.
It is said that in actual practice Avenzoar, who was a man of some wealth, confined himself to consultation work. He considered it beneath the dignity of a physician to prepare drugs, to apply leeches, or to perform certain surgical operations—as, for example, lithotomy; but Le Clerc seems disposed to believe that Avenzoar did not adopt this view until after he had become somewhat celebrated and had accumulated a fortune. Neuburger ranks him next to Rhazes as a clinical observer and a practitioner of sound common sense, and he speaks of his great medical work, the Teïssir, as a treatise that abounds in most interesting histories of cases of disease. Among these will be found the account of an attack of mediastinitis which occurred in his own person, and which ended in suppuration that found a vent for its products by way of one of the bronchi.[1] As this disease is of rare occurrence, and as Freind's account of the attack is presumably a translation of the original report in Arabic made by Avenzoar, its reproduction here may be interesting. I shall take the liberty of modernizing the text very slightly and of abbreviating it in one or two places.
- ↑ For further remarks concerning the origin of the Teïssir see page 229.
