The Principles of Surgery - v. 4 Author:John Bell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: hernia, fistula, and various diseases, the chief operators, and they were the only lithotomists. Though such operators were contemned by the learned, they were t... more »he idols of the vulgar; many among them operated to admiration, and one especially had the honour of attracting, in a peculiar manner, the malignity of the profession. This was Le Raoues, a lithotomist, who operated about a hundred years ago in the principal cities in the south of France. He practised a method not expressly known to Van Home, who only mentions the wonders this man was reported to perform, as an incitement to others to discover and practise his way of cutting for the stone. " I must not in this place neglect," says Van Home, "to mention what was reported to me six months ago, by a nobleman, who had not only witnessed in others, but experienced in his own person, the happy talents of one Raoues, a lithotomist, of Nismes, in France, who cuts men of all ages with singular address, without the usual ligatures, without other apparatus than a knife and hook, placing the patient merely on the knees of his assistant. For he is very skilful in catching the stone with his fingers, and pressing it so against the perinaeum, that, upon making a slight incision, the stone starts out of its own accord: nor is this all, for after the incision there is no haemorrhagy, nor does there pass even one drop of urine by the wound: which is easily explained; for the incisions of the skin, and of the internal wound, do not correspond; and, incredible as it may appear, the parts are healed in five or six days; so that on the ninth day this nobleman walked roundthe city with his operator. Satisfied of this fact, not by report, but by being in a manner a spectator of what was performed on this nobleman, I hold it right to relate ...« less