ABSTRACT
The practice and, more specifically, the techniques and operations of the officially recognized surgeon of the ancien régime are much more clearly visible to modern eyes than are those of the practitioner of popular and traditional folk-medicine. We cannot know what techniques were passed on in the predominantly oral tradition of the seventeenth-century expert, for example, no matter what part of surgery he or she was practising - but in the printed books and, later, published lectures of the surgeon we may see what kinds of operations the surgeons offered and what form those operations took. In examining these valuable sources, it can be seen that towards the end of the century the technical part of the surgeon’s practice was changing markedly, in two principal ways. The first of these, and perhaps the most readily apparent to us, was the dramatic increase in the number of different operations that could be performed. However, analysis of the methods and techniques employed by the surgeon reveals the second, which is of at least equal significance: an increasing level of complexity and innovation in the way in which tools or instruments could be used - although as we shall see, the surgeon’s instruments, for all their cunning design and intricate manufacture, should not be considered as the most important part of his armamentarium. It was the hands, of which the instruments were merely an extension, which were the vital tools of the surgeon.
