Its a commonplace to say that the Romans had a surgical tool for removing slingshot from people, but what's the name of this? What is the ultimate source of this data?  ???

Thanks!

From the Korfmann article:
"Celsus, perhaps the most judicious medical author of Greek and Roman times, included in his treatise De Medicina instructions for extracting lead and stone sling missiles from the bodies of wounded soldiers."

Johnny

Off the topic Johnny--Are you Johnny Shunamite, the one who did the pictures of the slingers??

Shunamite! Lol!!!
I did the ones on the gallery page. I've done alot more, and would like to write and illustrate a book one day on slinging. Mainly about the ancient Greek, Balearic and Roman slingers.
Johnny

wrote on Apr 19^th, 2004 at 7:50pm:

From the Korfmann article: "Celsus, perhaps the most judicious medical author of Greek and Roman times, included in his treatise De Medicina instructions for extracting lead and stone sling missiles from the bodies of wounded soldiers." Johnny

So no surgical tool, just a technique... so far...

Douglas
I've seen many different types of surgical tools the Romans used. I don't remember one specifically called "glande remover". I saw one that looked like a modern digital dialator (for looking up the anus and the vagina!). Maybe they would use it to spread open the wound(ouch!) and retrieve the glande. Can you say pain! I'll try and look for the book where I saw this.
Johnny

The text of Celsus refers not only the technique but also a tool that he call there "forceps" but that of course is not the obstetrics tool  ;D  

Look at this painting on a wall of Pompeian ruins. A surgeon is extracting a glans may be with that tool. I´d like to have a look at that picture you mention, Johnny, if you recover it.

http://perso.wanadoo.es/hondero/Album/medico.JPG

I was wondering if maybe it wasn't just a set of forceps.  Modern medicine, at least for English-speaking countries, takes a great deal of it's terminology from Latin.

Cool picture!  

How do we know he's pulling out a gland and not an arrow?

Chris

I think that if the artist wanted to depict an arrow would have drawn a bit of the shaft coming out of the leg  ;D

http://www.slinging.org/images/tools2b.jpg
http://www.slinging.org/images/tools1b.jpg

Here are the "tools"

The latin word "forceps" means pliers and tweezers, so they could be some of those tools in the book, mainly the pliers though in the painting it looks a little different of those of the book that are specific for teeth. It´s amazing the quality and development of Roman medical tools!

wrote on Apr 21^st, 2004 at 11:48am:

The text of Celsus refers not only the technique but also a tool that he call there "forceps" but that of course is not the obstetrics tool  ;D   Look at this painting on a wall of Pompeian ruins. A surgeon is extracting a glans may be with that tool. I´d like to have a look at that picture you mention, Johnny, if you recover it.

Due to the origin and dual nature of the Latine word "glande", the picture has a very strange aspect...  ::)

Thanks for the great info! The sling-stone removing tool is much more than a myth now! :)

I dimly recall reading something in _The Red Branch_ (a sort of collection of the adventures of the ancient Irish -- who were expert slingers, BTW -- take Cuchulain for instance), about *suction by mouth* being used to extract penetrating sling projectiles. I can't cite you chapter and verse about this, however. It's been a while. But once more we have strong anecdotal evidence of *penetrating* wounds, not mere blunt trauma, however severe.

Oz

The picture shown shows a physician using a scalpel to enlarge a wound so that a foreign body (arrowhead, glandes) etc could be more easily withdrawn with a forceps and probe. The technique is pretty much the same today. Better anesthesia though. ;D

back then, the most practiced method was getting them drunk, then (my own theory: ) maybe blind folding them so they wouldn't know what was happening.

Give em a stick to bite on :o

The forceps picture is very similar to one I saw when I lived in Sicily. The one in the mosaic I saw had a curved top, that fit over the top of the glande. The bottom was used to push the glande against this.
 Failing that, we go back to Celsus who said that if the glande is wedged into the bone and can't be pulled out, then cut to where the bone is, and saw out a triangular section of the bone where the glande is.
   Wonder what his fee was for that.

From Voellings article (translation from German):

"In these cases the wound should be opened and the intruded object should be removed with tweezers the same way it came in."

Celsus 7, 5, 4

Zwiebeltuete

I think you had to pay them to get them to stop. :P