steel with the magnet held close to the cornea, and after several
efforts she was successful--which Hildanes enumerates as one of the
advantages of being a married man.

Hildanes was particularly happy in his inventions of surgical
instruments, many of which were designed for locating and removing the
various missiles recently introduced in warfare.

The seventeenth century, which was such a flourishing one for anatomy
and physiology, was not as productive of great surgeons or advances in
surgery as the sixteenth had been or the eighteenth was to be. There was
a gradual improvement all along the line, however, and much of the work
begun by such surgeons as Pare and Hildanes was perfected or improved.
Perhaps the most progressive surgeon of the century was an Englishman,
Richard Wiseman (1625-1686), who, like Harvey, enjoyed royal favor,
being in the service of all the Stuart kings. He was the first surgeon
to advocate primary amputation, in gunshot wounds, of the limbs, and
also to introduce the treatment of aneurisms by compression; but he
is generally rated as a conservative operator, who favored medication
rather than radical operations, where possible.

In Italy, Marcus Aurelius Severinus (1580-1656) and Peter Marchettis
(1589-1675) were the leading surgeons of their nation. Like many of his
predecessors in Europe, Severinus ran amuck with the Holy Inquisition
and fled from Naples. But the waning of the powerful arm of the Church
is shown by the fact that he was brought back by the unanimous voice
of the grateful citizens, and lived in safety despite the frowns of the
theologians.

The sixteenth century cannot be said to have added much of importance in
the field of practical medicine, and, as in the preceding and succeeding
centuries, was at best only struggling along in the wake of anatomy,
physiology, and surgery. In the seventeenth century, however, at least
one discovery in therapeutics was made that has been an inestimable boon
to humanity ever since. This was the introduction of cinchona bark (from
which quinine is obtained) in 1640. But this century was productive
of many medical SYSTEMS, and could boast of many great names among the
medical profession, and, on the whole, made considerably more progress
than the preceding century.

Of the founders of medical systems, one of the most widely known is Jan
Baptista van Helmont (1578-1644), an eccentric genius who constructed
a system of medicine of his