tone through the abdomen instead of through
the perineum. His works, while written in an illiterate style, give the
clearest descriptions of any of the early modern writers.

As the fame of Franco rests upon his operation for prolonging human
life, so the fame of his Italian contemporary, Gaspar Tagliacozzi
(1545-1599), rests upon his operation for increasing human comfort and
happiness by restoring amputated noses. At the time in which he lived
amputation of the nose was very common, partly from disease, but also
because a certain pope had fixed the amputation of that member as the
penalty for larceny. Tagliacozzi probably borrowed his operation
from the East; but he was the first Western surgeon to perform it and
describe it. So great was the fame of his operations that patients
flocked to him from all over Europe, and each "went away with as many
noses as he liked." Naturally, the man who directed his efforts to
restoring structures that bad been removed by order of the Church was
regarded in the light of a heretic by many theologians; and though he
succeeded in cheating the stake or dungeon, and died a natural death,
his body was finally cast out of the church in which it had been buried.

In the sixteenth century Germany produced a surgeon, Fabricius Hildanes
(1560-1639), whose work compares favorably with that of Pare, and
whose name would undoubtedly have been much better known had not the
circumstances of the time in which he lived tended to obscure his
merits. The blind followers of Paracelsus could see nothing outside the
pale of their master's teachings, and the disastrous Thirty Years' War
tended to obscure and retard all scientific advances in Germany. Unlike
many of his fellow-surgeons, Hildanes was well versed in Latin and
Greek; and, contrary to the teachings of Paracelsus, he laid particular
stress upon the necessity of the surgeon having a thorough knowledge
of anatomy. He had a helpmate in his wife, who was also something of a
surgeon, and she is credited with having first made use of the magnet
in removing particles of metal from the eye. Hildanes tells of a certain
man who had been injured by a small piece of steel in the cornea,
which resisted all his efforts to remove it. After observing Hildanes'
fruitless efforts for a time, it suddenly occurred to his wife to
attempt to make the extraction with a piece of loadstone. While the
physician held open the two lids, his wife attempted to withdraw the