Palla Ákos szerk.: Az Országos Orvostörténeti Könyvtár közleményei 13. (Budapest, 1959)
Dr. I. CSILLAG and Dr. H. JELLINEK: From primitive Haemostatic Methods to Modern Vascular Surgery
the heart it gets into the body and when reaching the brain, it is filled with the pneuma of the soul. Galen recognized also blood and not only air to be present in the arteries. Further, he recognised that the heart moves, but he had not the faintest idea of blood circulation. He was the author of more than 500 books of which 8 have survived. The question may now arise how the ancient surgeons who were excellent in venesection, ligaturing, amputation, embalming and who performed dexterous operations on the eye, could accept this theory of pneuma. Everybody knows today that cutting an artery results in haemorrhage. They also saw that. But they explained the arterial haemorrhage with the theory of pneuma and also in a very tricky way. If something is hurt —they said —blood escapes from the artery because through the opening due to the injury the air, the pneuma had left. Since the physical law of the horror vacui was known already, they thought that the vacuum formed at the place of the air that had left drew up the blood from the veins thus filling the arteries with blood and causing haemorrhage after injuries. This fantastic theory became dogma for several milleniums of time and was regarded as infallible. Up to 1727 no one thought of revising this thesis. Galen experimented also on living animals and enriched his anatomical knowledge by dissecting pigs. He also dealt intensively with the anatomical conditions of monkeys. As physician of the gladiators he had the opportunity of ligating vessels; he used silk thread and catgut for this purpose. The two fundamental methods in the case of vascular injuries, that is, the ligation and the circular suturing of the vessel soon sank into oblivion. A constant decline of the medical science due to religious dogmatism, was ensuing; the priests had a "horror of blood" and dissection and animal experiments were forbidden. All the knowledge compiled by the ancient physicians became gradually forgotten. Contrariwise to the well-developed Greek and Roman methods of vascular surgery the okl Germam knew but one method to help in cush cases: they put hot tar on the wound.
