Principles of military surgery : comprising, observations on the arrangement, police, and practice of hospitals, and on the history, treatment, and anomalies of variola and syphilis. Illustrated with cases and dissections / By John Hennen.

  • Hennen, John, 1779-1828.
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of military surgery : comprising, observations on the arrangement, police, and practice of hospitals, and on the history, treatment, and anomalies of variola and syphilis. Illustrated with cases and dissections / By John Hennen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    The school was good; but the best and most natural feelings of the human heart were too deeply lacerated to permit any inde- pendent man long to continue a pupil. A brighter day has, however, dawned on Military Surgery; encouragement has been held out to the active, the respectable, and the well educated; and the country has been repaid for its judicious liberality (tardy as it has been) by the acceptance of its offers. It is to be hoped, that no petty jealousies, nor ill- judged economy, may sap this fair foundation, and that a re- collection of what has happened at the commencement of for- mer wars may influence our future statesmen. Ingenious and speculative men of almost every profession have affected to find traces of their favourite art in the oldest and most venerable of books; and where written records have failed, they have plunged into the unrecorded depths of antiquity, and supplied, by bold and plausible conjecture, the deficien- cies of fact. In imitation of this example, I might show that man, in his earliest state, was subjected to disease;—whe- ther proceeding fr«m internal causes or from mechanical in- flictions, it is not necessary to investigate, since it is certain that mankind early congregated together for the purposes of mutual aggression and mutual defence; and although we cannot trace the actual existence of surgeons among the armies of those barbarous hordes,we may be assured that experience would teach many of them the more simple and obvious means of re- lieving themselves from the injuries inflicted by the teeth or the clubs of their enemies. Some traces of humanity would probably induce these individuals to offer assistance to others, while self-interest and nascent ambition would soon contribute to spread their fame. The fortunate tribe who possessed our aboriginal surgeons would be distinguished among its fellow savages, while these gifted men became the object of Jove, terror, and, by a very natural transition, of adoration also. Upon the whole, without wandering farther into the regions of conjecture, we may conclude, that military surgery, rude and imperfect though it was, if not the very first, was at least among the earliest of the arts which the follies and the infirmi- ties of mankind forced them to cultivate. From the writings of the first of the Greek poets, we find that the army-surgeons of antiquity united in their own per- sons the soldier, the physician, and not unfrequently the prince, and that honours almost divine were paid them. From histo- rical testimony we are informed, that Cyrus provided the most able physicians and surgeons to attend his army both in the field and at sieges, and that, after he got possession of Baby- lon, he formed in that city a depot of medicines and surgical instruments for their use. We also know that Alexander the