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  • Traumatologie und Feldchirurgie an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Exemplarisch Dargestellt anhand der "Grossen Chirurgie" des Walther Hermann Ryff
  • Kathleen Crowther-Heyck
Ralf Vollmuth . Traumatologie und Feldchirurgie an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Exemplarisch Dargestellt anhand der "Grossen Chirurgie" des Walther Hermann Ryff. Supplement 45 to Sudhoffs Archiv. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001. 352 pp. Ill. €44.00 (3-515-07742-1).

Ralf Vollmuth deals here with surgery in the late medieval and early modern period, focusing particularly on the ways in which surgeons dealt with traumatic injuries such as wounds and broken bones. His account of surgical practices is based largely on one sixteenth-century surgical text, Walther Hermann Ryff's Great Surgery of 1545. Traumatologie und Feldchirurgie is largely descriptive rather than analytical and provides the reader with a rich, if somewhat undigested, feast of information on sixteenth-century surgical procedures.

Two preliminary chapters deal with surgical instruments and medicaments. Vollmuth includes more than one hundred illustrations of surgical instruments from the Great Surgery; he also provides a detailed catalog of the drugs mentioned by Ryff, along with a cautious assessment of their efficacy. In the long central chapter, he meticulously details Ryff's surgical techniques for dealing with traumatic injuries, especially those sustained during military combat. The strength of the book lies in these detailed descriptions of surgical practice. Vollmuth enhances our understanding of the capabilities and limitations of late medieval and early modern surgeons and provides insight into the range of problems faced by military surgeons in this period.

The book also goes some way to restoring Ryff to a place in the history of medicine, in itself a valuable contribution. As Vollmuth notes, Ryff has been regarded, at best, as a mere compiler of other writers' work, and at worst, as a rank plagiarist. He argues that Ryff's status as a compiler rather than an innovator makes his work an ideal window into the surgical knowledge and practice of the waning Middle Ages: Ryff's text is more representative of the average surgeon's techniques than would be that of a self-conscious innovator.

Despite the wealth of detail that Vollmuth provides, and despite his obvious familiarity with the primary and secondary literature, the aims and scope of his book are far too modest. His exclusive focus on Ryff's book prevents him from making broad claims and arguments about surgery in this period. As Vollmuth himself acknowledges, the Great Surgery was one of a large number of surgical texts produced between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, many of which were never printed and remain little studied. He does not claim that Ryff's text can illuminate all aspects of sixteenth-century surgical practice; instead, he offers his reading of that text as a preliminary step on the way to a fuller understanding of late medieval and early modern surgery. He insists that only after similar studies of other surgical texts have been undertaken can a full picture emerge; however, I am skeptical that every important text must be the subject of a three-hundred-page scholarly monograph before meaningful comparisons and generalizations can be drawn.

Further, Vollmuth fails to connect Ryff's text to its context. While he gives a detailed account of the surgical procedures described by Ryff, he does not [End Page 713] attempt to correlate them with actual surgical practice. He gives no information on the numbers of surgeons who owned and read Ryff's book, and he offers no thoughts on how it might have been used by practicing surgeons. The reader is left to wonder to what degree the Great Surgery is a reflection of surgical knowledge and practice and to what degree it is idealized and prescriptive. For example, in looking over the numerous images of surgical instruments, many highly specialized and others beautifully outfitted with ornamental handles and other decorative details, I wondered how many practicing surgeons were likely to own and use all or most of these instruments. Attention to the readers and uses of the Great Surgery, as well as its influence, would have greatly enriched Vollmuth's book.

Kathleen Crowther-Heyck
University of Oklahoma

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