The Hindu method left a large, pyramid-shaped scar on the patient's forehead. Tagliacozzi developed a method of using the same amount of skin but obtaining it from under the forearm. Because the forearm was mobile, a frame was built around the person's head to hold the forearm against the nose area until the forearm flap of skin attached itself to form a new nose.
He also performed similar operations for repair on the ears, lips, and tongue.
As for the young woman from Genoa whose defense of her virtues caused the loss of her nose, it is said that the operation was a complete success, except that in cold weather her nose developed a rather purplish hue.
Tagliacozzi relates his techniques in De Chirurgia Curtorum Per Insitionem, published a couple of years before his death, a copy of which in Spanish found its way to the don's library.
One of the worst contagions on the face of the earth is commonly called syphilis, or the French disease. It is said that the disease got its name from the shepherd Syphlius, who insulted Apollo; the angry god inflicted upon Syphlius a loathsome disease that spread like wildfire.
Syphilis has struck the hearts of every man and woman in the New World and the old. Acquired through copulation, many men have carried it home to their wives. The priests chide us that syphilis is a disease of sin, put on earth by God to punish the promiscuous, but what sin does an innocent woman commit who gets this dreaded affliction because the husband she has no control over carries it home from a whore or an amorous adventure?
For those who do not shake it in its early stages, there is no cure for the disease except death. For some the death comes slowly, eating away the life of the person; others are carried away mercifully—but painfully—quickly. One out of every two persons who get the contagion dies from it.
The treatment is as horrible as the frightful, raw, painful rash and ulcers that cover an infected person's body. When the sores are present on the body, the infected person is placed in a barrel or tub with mercury in it. A tub ordinarily used for the salting of meat so that it would last longer was often utilized. Tub or barrel, the container was large enough to contain the body of a man and so it was used for sweating out the malady and fumigating syphilitics. The contents of the container, man and mercury in powder or liquid form, were heated.
It is said the cure kills as many as the disease. Many of those who survive the cure have tremors of the hands, feet, and head along with frightening grimaces, death's head skull grins.
Don Julio told me that alchemists, who supplied the mercury compound to barbers and others who gave the treatments, finally realized their dreams of turning mercury into gold by the treatment of syphilis.
Some claim Columbus's men brought the dreaded disease back from America. On their return to Spain, many of them chose to become mercenaries and had hurried to join King Ferdinand of Naples, who was defending his kingdom against King Charles of France. After Naples fell, the Spaniards entered the service of the French king and carried the disease along with them to France. Because of its early prevalence in the French army, it earned the common name of the "French disease."
The indios deny that the disease is a New World one and claim that the Spaniards brought it with them and that it killed as many indios as the peste and vomitó.
Who knows? Perhaps both are right—the Lord acts in mysterious ways.
Another wonderful story of medicine fascinated me, that of the French battlefield surgeon, Ambriose Paré. This was another man who died not too long before my birth.
When Paré was a young army surgeon, the common way to stop bleeding of a gunshot wound was to cauterize it with boiling oil. The black powder used in cannons and smaller weapons was considered poisonous; boiling oil was applied to eliminate the poison, stop the bleeding, and cure the wound. Applying hot oil to a wound was extremely painful to the soldiers who were already suffering great pain.
During a period of heavy casualties, Paré ran out of oil and improvised, applying a salve made from egg yolks, rose essence, and turpentine. To stop the bleeding, he took the radical step of sewing closed the damaged arteries. To his surprise, and the surprise of the surgeons working around him, his patients almost all survived, while the death rate on those who had boiling oil applied was exceptionally high.
Like many heroes of medicine and science, Paré was not immediately proclaimed a hero. Careful to give the Inquisition its due, he always denied he had cured the men. To avoid a charge that he was in league with the devil, after every treatment, he said, "I dressed his wound; God healed him."
It is from Paré that Don Julio learned the technique of removing a musket ball or arrow with the person in the same position as when the object entered.
Alas, the price of fame and success: Paré's fame grew, jealous surgeons tried to poison him.
After reading of Paré's skills and knowledge and seeing Don Julio's educated application of medicine, I was struck by how miraculous it was that Fray Antonio was able to perform surgery with little knowledge of anatomy and kitchen utensils for instruments. Eh, no doubt the Lord was guiding his hands.
Thinking about the miracles the fray performed, the tale of another medical miracle came to mind. Suffering from a gangrenous left leg, a farmer named Roberto fell into a coma at the door of a church. In his unconscious state, he dreamt that saints had come and removed him to a hospital. The saints performed an operation to amputate the leg below the knee and performed the same operation, postmortem, on a patient who had died in an adjoining bed. They sewed the leg from the dead man onto the farmer. When Roberto awoke the next day, he discovered he had two sound legs.
When he returned home from the hospital, Roberto told his family and friends about the incident. Each time he told them that he had been the recipient of a miracle, that saints themselves had sewed the leg of a dead man to replace his amputated one, people scoffed. When they did, he lifted up his pants to prove his story.
One of his legs was white, the other black.
The man on the bed beside him had been africano.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
While I swam in a sea of knowledge, I lived in a world of ignorance and fear. It was dangerous to display any sort of knowledge outside of the tight circle formed by Don Julio, Mateo, and myself. I learned this painful lesson from Don Julio, whom I am sad to say claims that I am the only friend he has ever had who incites him to violence.
The incident occurred when a woman Don Julio had treated died in a town a day's ride from the hacienda. I accompanied Don Julio to the woman's home, where she was being prepared for burial. The woman was not of a great age, about forty years old, which is about what I calculated Don Julio's own age to be. And she had appeared to be in good health immediately prior to her expiration.
To further complicate matters, she was a wealthy widow who had recently married a younger man, who had a reputation as a profligate and womanizer.
Upon arrival at the house, Don Julio sent all but the alcalde and her priest out of the death room and examined the body. He suspected arsenic poisoning because of the smell of bitter almonds from her mouth.
The priest announced that the woman had expired from sinfulness because she had married so soon after the death of her husband and to a man whom the Church frowned upon.
I laughed at the priest's prognosis. "People don't die from sin."
The next thing I knew I was nearly knocked across the room by a blow from Don Julio. "Young fool! What do you know about the mysterious workings of God?"