Jean Juville, identified in French dictionaries and catalogs as Juville, hernia expert, was an 18th century surgeon educated at the Royal College of Surgery in Paris, and a truss maker.
Before publishing his principal work on hernia bandages (Traité des bandages herniaires, Paris 1786), he already had forty years of experience practicing surgery, studying and perfecting these instruments. He presented the bandages of his invention to the Academy of Sciences in 1773, and published extensively on the subject in the Journal de Medicine in 1775, 1777, and 1783. His name was well known and respected. There was no author writing about hernia bandages in the late 18th and early 19th century who would not refer to or talk about this Parisian truss maker. Juville’s treatise is considered the best 18th century work on the subject. Continue reading
We know very little about the author of an unusual book on hernia found in the Falk Library Rare Book Collection. Jean Pierre Le Rouge was a surgeon at the College of Surgeons in Paris and at the Hôtel-Dieu in the second half of the 18th century and was the author of two books on hernias. He had 17 years of experience working at the biggest hospital in Paris, Hôtel-Dieu, when he published his first popular work Avis très important aux personnes attaquées de hernies ou descentes [Translation: Very important notice to people attacked by hernia] in 1784. A year later, in 1785, his thesis Dissertatio anatomico-chirurgica de perfecta inguinalis herniae simplicis curatione [Translation: Thesis on the treatment of inguinal hernia] appeared. Both books are very scarce.
John K’eogh (1681-1754) was an Irish naturalist and the author of Botanologia Universalis Hibernica (1735), an early Irish herbal, and Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (1739). His intent with both works was to show that his country was self-sufficient to produce all remedies to cure the locals of any sickness without the need to import foreign medicines.
Although he was not a loveable person, his innovative teaching methods, and the excellent books he authored, earned him the respect of the medical profession. He is remembered as a great surgeon, anatomist, and discoverer of the naso-palatine nerve. His study of the hearing and olfactory organs is considered classic. He was the first to correctly delineate the nerves of the heart. In his authoritative works on hernia, he described perineal hernia from direct observations, thus settling any earlier controversy of its existence. His work, Saggio di osservazioni e d’esperienze sulle principali malattie degli occhi (Practical observations on the principal diseases of the eyes, 1806), raised ophthalmology to the level of an autonomous science. Plate I from this work is one of the most famous illustrations in medicine, in which science and art become one.
