- dolid, and, after passing with great credit the competitive
examination, he was given the appointment. During the following six years he served that institution with conspicuous ability, and then accepted the position of private physician to Prince Don Carlos, the son of Philip the Second, King of Spain. Four years later he entered the service of Don Juan of Austria (the natural brother of Philip the Second), and accompanied this prince on his sea voyages to various parts of the Mediterranean; being with him, for example, on the occasion of the bloody sea fight in the Gulf of Lepanto in 1571. On reaching the age of seventy, Daza Chacon retired from active practice and devoted himself to the writing of his great work on surgery—"Practica y teorica de cirujia, en Romance y en Latin," Valladolid, 1600; and several later editions. The date of Chacon's death is not known, but it certainly occurred before the publication of his book.
Von Gurlt says that Chacon's treatise is distinguished by the systematic and clear manner in which the author treats the subjects with which he deals, and it shows him to be well versed in the teachings of other writers on surgery, that he is ready at all times to give them full credit for any contributions which they may have made to this branch of medicine, and that he is remarkably free from the superstitiousness which was so prevalent in his day. Of all the treatises on surgery which have been written by Spaniards, either during the sixteenth century or at a more recent date, this work, says von Gurlt, is unquestionably the best.
The edition of the treatise published at Madrid in 1626 contains 922 pages—a large work. Among the reports of cases published in Part II., there are several which possess features of considerable interest, but I shall be able to reproduce only one of them here:—
The young prince, Don Carlos, aged seventeen, while residing
temporarily at Alcalá de Henares, plunged head foremost, in the
dark, down a steep staircase and struck his head against a closed
door. When the lad was picked up it was found that, at the back
of his head, there was an open wound about the size of a man's
thumbnail, that the surrounding scalp showed evidences of being
