Lithotomy

“ Haying early become surgeon to the London Hospital, and gained a large and profitable city practice, he was able to retire on his fortune at the age of forty-six. He was notable both for his knowledge of anatomy and for his invention of a special knife for lithotomy. ”

“ The Operation of Lithotomy in Women is usually perform'd by the lesser Preparative, which is done by putting the Fore-finger and Middle-finger into the Vagina Uteri, or into the Rectum in young Virgins, to draw the Stone to the Neck of the Bladder, and keep it steady, so that it may be taken out with a Hook, or other Instrument. ”

“ Sometimes, however, the false arts served indirectly to advance the true. Alchemy led the way to chemistry, and enriched medicine with new remedies, and at least one crotchet of scholastic divinity may be supposed to have done something for the progress of anatomy; for “the skeleton received, perhaps, an adventitious attention in consequence of the popular belief that, in man, some one particular bone existed of an imponderable, incombustible, and indestructible nature, around which, as a nucleus, all other tissues and organs would collect and re-assume their vital actions at the resurrection. ”

“ The geologist finds a fossil skeleton. His acquaintance with anatomy enables him to pronounce that the objects found are bones. He sees cylinders, condyles, cavities for the marrow, scars of attachment of muscles and tendons, foramina for the passage of nerves and blood-vessels; he finds the internal structure, no less than the form and surface, such as to leave not a doubt that these are real bones. Now universal experience has taught him that bones imply the existence of flesh; that flesh implies blood; that blood implies life; that life implies time. ”

“ Itinerant Lithotomists.—For an unknown number of years preceding the sixteenth century it had been a well-established custom for members of the medical profession in France, and also, doubtless, in neighboring countries, to intrust—as the Hippocratic oath enjoined—all cases of stone in the bladder to expert lithotomists. Such special knowledge and skill were not easily acquired, and so it came about that there were very few individuals who were acknowledged to be experts and who were really capable of teaching the art, and these few guarded most carefully the knowledge which they had gained. ”

“ No doubt, had the human skeletons been found to contain more gelatine than those of the extinct mammalia, it would have shown that they were the more modern of the two; but it is possible that after a bone has gone on losing its animal matter up to a certain point, it may then part with no more so long as it continues enveloped in the same matrix. If this be so, it follows that bones of very different degrees of antiquity, after they have lain for many thousands of years in a particular soil, may all have reached long ago the maximum of decomposition attainable in such a matrix. ”

“ In the course of the last quarter of a century, thousands of them have been submitted to the examination of skilful osteologists, and they have been unable to detect among them one fragment of a human skeleton, not even a tooth. Yet Cuvier pointed out long ago, that the bones of Man found buried in ancient battle-fields were not more decayed than those of horses interred in the same graves. We have seen that in the Liege caverns, the skulls, jaws, and teeth, with other bones of the human race, were preserved in the same condition as those of the cave-bear, tiger, and mammoth. ”

“ The remains of man are nowhere found in the strata which contain the records of former states of the earth. Skeletons of vast varieties of creatures have been disinterred from their rocky tombs; but these cemeteries of nature supply no portion of a human skeleton. In earlier periods of natural science, when comparative anatomy was as yet very imperfectly understood, no doubt, many fossil bones were supposed to be human bones. ”

“ We watch the different tools and the traces of the way things16 were done—how the burials were arranged, what the living-places were like, and so on. We wonder about the people themselves, for the traces of habits and traditions are useful to us only as clues to the men who once had them. So we ask the physical anthropologists about the skeletons that we found in the burials. The physical anthropologists tell us about the anatomy and the similarities and differences which the skeletons show when compared with other skeletons. ”

“ Throughout the middle ages, there was a firm belief in the existence in the human body of an indestructible bone which was thought to be the necessary nucleus of the resurrection body. With the revival of dissection and the study of anatomy in the sixteenth century, many anatomists searched for it eagerly but it was never found. ”

“ II. As a pathological state lycanthropy may be described as a kind of hysteria, and may perhaps be brought into connexion with the form of it known as latah. It is characterized by the patient’s belief that he has been metamorphosed into an animal, and is often accompanied by a craving for strange articles of food, including the flesh of living beings or of corpses. In the lower stages of culture the state of the patient is commonly explained as due to possession, but where he leaves the neighbourhood of man real metamorphosis may be asserted, as in ordinary lycanthropic beliefs. ”

“ The idea of lycanthropy has probably been familiar to the peasants of Greece continuously from the earliest ages down to the present day, either surviving traditionally like so many other beliefs, or possibly stimulated by actual experiences; for lycanthropy is not a mere figment of the imagination, but is a very real and terrible form of madness, under the influence of which the sufferer believes himself transformed (and by dress or lack of it tries to transfigure himself) into a wolf or other wild animal, and in that state develops and satisfies a craving for human flesh. ”

“ Or if a traveller were to visit the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and there find buried beneath the overwhelming torrent of once burning lava, all possible kinds of human memorials, not only in human works, but also in the skeleton remains of human beings, would he not come to the conclusion that these were indubitable evidences of those cities having once been inhabited by man, and that these skeletons were once covered with warm flesh, and that they had lived, and moved, and had their being, even as we do now, amidst the activities and enjoyments of actual 108life? ”

“ The Egyptian pyramids and mummies, the graves and older dolmens, seem to testify to a very close and dependent relation between spirit [Pg 127] and body. The spirit hovered around the body and returned to it, and where the mouldering bones lay there was the spirit’s home. Its life was a very direct continuance of the life in the body. Hence also the food and libations and the rich burial gifts. But toward the close of the Neolithic period we find the great stone chamber giving place to a small cyst or vault, hardly more than a stone coffin, and entirely underground. ”

“ New remains, dug up from the Pliocene or Tertiary deposits, had enabled the more far-seeing or audacious among learned men to assign even a far greater degree of antiquity to the human race. These remains, it is true, were not those of men; that is, were not the bones of men, but objects decidedly having served the human race: shinbones, thighbones of fossil animals, regularly scooped out, and in fact sculptured—bearing the unmistakable signs of human handiwork. ”

“ I shudder as I recall these monsters to my remembrance. No human eye has ever beheld them living. They burdened this earth a thousand ages before man appeared, but their fossil remains, found in the argillaceous limestone called by the English the lias, have enabled their colossal structure to be perfectly built up again and anatomically ascertained. ”

“ Some of the tombs are open, as if burst asunder by an explosion, and the skeletons stand bolt upright; some are half closed, and their occupants creeping quietly out; while in others the disjointed bones are seen, not yet rebuilt into human shape, or a skeleton is detected half clothed with flesh, and some bones still protruding in their original bareness. ”

“ Lastly, recent bones may have fallen into the fissures or caverns of ancient rocks, and been enveloped by stalactites or other incrustations. In every individual instance, therefore, it becomes necessary to analyze and appreciate all those circumstances which might disguise the real origin of fossil remains; and it rarely happens that people who have collected bones have been themselves aware of this necessity, the consequence of which has been, that the true characters of their geological position have been almost always neglected or misunderstood. ”

“ In the earlier strata, representing an earlier stage of life, we find only thick seams of black shale, limestone, and ironstone, in which we seem to see the ashes of primitive organisms, cremated in the appalling fires of the volcanic age, or crushed out of recognition by the superimposed masses. Even if some wizardry of science were ever to restore the forms that have been reduced to ashes in this Archaean crematorium, it would be found that they are more or less advanced forms, far above the original level of life. ”

“ In my hall I see the marble faces of my ancestors. In the Ceramicus, I survey their tombs! In the streets, I behold the hand of Phidias and the soul of Pericles. Harmodius, Aristogiton—they are everywhere—but in our hearts!—in mine, at least, they shall not perish! If anything can make me forget that I am an Athenian and not free, it is partly the soothing—the love—watchful, vivid, sleepless—of Ione—a love that has taken a new sentiment in our new creed—a love which none of our poets, beautiful though they be, had shadowed forth in description ”

“ The principal remains of antiquity are a theatre and amphitheatre, many sepulchres, the Latomie, the catacombs, and the famous Ear of Dionysius, which it was impossible to destroy. The Latomie now forms a noble subterraneous garden, and is, indeed, a very beautiful and romantic spot. The whole is hewn out of a rock as hard as marble, composed entirely of a concretion of gravel, shells, and other marine bodies; [Pg 400] and many orange, bergamot, and fig trees, grow out of the hard rock, where there is no mark of any soil. ”

“ The human bones, therefore, in the caves which are associated with such fabricated objects, must belong not to antediluvian periods, but to a people in the same stage of civilization as those who constructed the tumuli and altars. ”

“ SECTION OF PART OF THE HILL OF FAJOLES PASSING THROUGH THE SEPULCHRAL GROTTO OF AURIGNAC (E. Lartet) . a. Part of the vault in which the remains of seventeen human skeletons were found. b. Layer of made ground, two feet thick, inside the grotto in which a few human bones, with entire bones of extinct and living species of animals, and many works of art were embedded. c. Layers of ashes and charcoal, six inches thick, with broken, burnt, and gnawed bones of extinct and Recent mammalia; also hearth-stones and works of art; no human bones. ”

“ In the study of any problem if the lithogenesis of the formations concerned points overwhelmingly to one and only one history for those formations, then slight palaeontological incongruities should not be accepted as vitiating the history pointed by the facts of lithogenesis; the apparent incongruities can generally be turned into confirmatory bits of evidence if a broad enough knowledge and a scientifically guided imagination can be brought into play. ”

“ As the human skulls and bones were in fragments, and no entire skeleton had been found, he does not believe that these caves were places of sepulture, but that the human remains were washed in at the same time as the bones of extinct quadrupeds, and that these lost species of mammalia co-existed on the earth with man. ”

“ Among the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, and all modern nations, we see the honors of embalming accorded to Kings, Princes and men of distinction, but no tomb that has been opened, has rendered a single mummy so perfect, as those which we admire among the Egyptians. ”

“ No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race—whether or no we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or "diluvium," to prove the former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia. ”

“ With one consent, though in silence, every one gathered nearer, and looked in—they saw a human skeleton. The action of the elements, which the sands had not been able to impede, had destroyed every vestige of a human frame, except those discoloured bones, and long tresses of dark hair, which were wound around the scull. ”

“ Here, therefore, we have evidence of an entire limb not having been washed in a fossil state out of an older alluvium, and then swept afterwards into a cave, so as to be mingled with flint implements, but having been introduced when clothed with its flesh, or at least when it had the separate bones bound together by their natural ligaments, and in that state buried in mud. ”

“ The reasons which have hindered the ancients from carrying to any great length a knowledge of the structure of man and animals, was not only the idea of filthiness attached to the sight and dissection of dead bodies, or the difficulty of procuring the means of dissection; but rather the almost absolute impossibility of preserving dead bodies in part or entire, which has retarded the progress of anatomy. ”

“ Those they taught were of two kinds;—the Cataclysm, or destruction by water, which sweeps away the whole human race, and annihilates all the animal and vegetable productions of nature; and the Ecpyrosis, or destruction by fire, which dissolves the globe itself. From the Egyptians also they derived the doctrine of the gradual debasement of man from a state of innocence. Towards the termination of each era, the gods could no longer bear with the wickedness of men, and a shock of the elements or a deluge overwhelmed them ”