ARCEUS, Franciscus and ARDERNE, John of, trans. READ, John.

An enterprising work. The first edition in English of the sixteenth-century Spanish physician Arceus and the medieval English surgeon John of Ardern, translated by the poetically inclined Tudor surgeon John Read, with treatises on head wounds, urethral caruncles, anal fistulas, and emplaisters.  

The first work is on the surgical treatment of head wounds, including of wounds in children and infants, trepanning, and sewing up facial wounds without scarring; wounds and diseases affecting the breast, including breast cancer in women; wounds to the belly and lungs; fistulas; simple and compound wounds; ulcers, etc. Read also provides a translation of the notes by Alvaro Nuñez. Included are numerous recipes for herbal remedies, with an exhortation to surgeons to study herbal simples and medicines, and anecdotal accounts of surgery performed on sword and dagger injuries. The woodcut of a boot and wooden frame at the start illustrates Arceus’s description of healing the feet of children born lame.

 John of Arderne is the first documented English surgeon. His work, dated 1349, is on anal fistulas, which are tunnels between the anus and the skin caused by ulcers. It is prefaced by his account of curing various nobles and worthies, as well as fishmongers and friars, with graphic descriptions of their conditions. There follow descriptions of the surgical instruments used in closing fistulas, and sections on why cancers in the anus are incurable, fistulas of the fingers, and swellings of the knees and ankles, generally referring to specific cases treated by Arderne. He then gives a series of recipes for non-surgical treatments and discusses the qualities of various chemical and herbal substances including arsenic and wormwood. One remedy for anal ulcers uses balls made from ground mussel shells and bacon fat.

John Read also includes works, apparently his own, on caruncles, which are urethral ulcers or swellings, and on the use of an emplaister, i.e. a plaster or salve for treating wounds, as described by Galen in De compositione medicamentorum, called Dia chalciteos. Read was firmly committed to exposing quacks and to advancing surgery as a serious medical discipline; in Gloucester in 1587, he was instrumental in the prosecution of a Flemish charlatan doctor. He dedicates this work to some of his English surgical colleagues, stating in the dedicatory letter that surgeons should have the status of physicians and should be distinct from barber-surgeons who he derides along with cunning-women and quacks. This was apparently a dangerous opinion. In his preface to the reader, Read records incidents in which English surgeons were threatened with daggers and rapiers by the quacks. The preface includes a poem on ‘envy and slander,’ followed by a poem on quack surgeons, ‘A Complaint of the Abuse of the Noble Art Chirurgerie.’ At the end is a second preface to the reader, arguing for the importance of book-learning in physicians, with a third poem, this one copied from a work by the English surgeon John Hall (1529-68), after which Read tells those who would quarrel with him to keep their thoughts to themselves. Finally, he includes the Hippocratic Oath in English.