Description

The surgeon Thomas Pettigrew (1791-1865) was interested in all aspects of antiquity. He gained fame in society through his mummy-unwrapping parties, and his History of Egyptian Mummies is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. His interest in the early history of medicine is evidenced by this edition of a work by John Hall, which was published by the Percy Society in 1844. Hall was a surgeon, born 1529/30, who published this work in 1565 as an appendix to his translation of the work of the thirteenth-century surgeon Lanfranc of Milan. Little is known about Hall except that he practised medicine in Maidstone, Kent, and had published acrostic verses. He was vociferous in his indignation against fraudulent medicine, and this work describes nine incidents where quacks, both male and female, had visited Maidstone and offered miraculous cures to the gullible: Hall himself was involved in prosecuting some of them.