Determinación de la velocidad de trabajo de las cosechadoras

James Cooke’s translation in the second edition of Select

Observations has been the standard version of Hall’s manuscript since 1679. Historians have too easily taken it for granted that the translation was both accurate and complete, without comparing it with the original Latin. Joan Lane made more effort than most to compare Select Observations with Hall’s manuscript, but her main interest was in the identity of his patients. Her comments in John Hall show that she tended to look only at the opening and closing paragraphs of each report in the Latin as they contained the most patient information. She did not read through all the text in the longer cases.

Cooke’s translation contains both errors and omissions. One error is Cooke’s attribution of the cure of Earl of Northampton (Case 137) to the Oxford physician Dr Clayton rather than to Hall himself. Equally significant are Cooke’s omissions which affect the balance of the text. Hall recorded several conversations with patients, either at the time of consultation or at follow up. Cooke radically abridged these, turning consultations into brisk medical summaries, but in the process losing much of Hall’s personal views on his

relationships with patients. These deletions may be explicable as removing matter of little interest to a late seventeenth-century medical readership, for whom the identities of patients would not

have been relevant as evidence of successful therapies (this is discussed more fully in Chapter 1). Two other categories of omission, of references to named authors or books and of texts on theory, are more likely to be Cooke’s editorial policy. The inclusion of these would have weakened Cooke’s deliberate presentation of Hall as a physician dependant almost entirely on empirical practice and observation. This is expressed in the words of Cooke’s

colleague John Bird of Cambridge, in a foreword to the first edition:14

For this book, I have this to say, that as Practice is the last and chiefest part if Physik, so is Observation the surest, and most demonstrating, part of Practice. Hence it cometh to pass through defect of Observations, that so many Prescriptions we meet with in the works of the most learned Practitioners, fall often short in performing the cures they promise, and we took them up for; so often delivering us as their own what they took from other men upon Trust.15

Hall’s practice, as Chapter 1 shows, was undoubtedly based on ‘the works of the most learned practitioners’.

Casebooks are becoming more closely studied and compared, as discussed in Chapter 2, but this will only pay dividends if the texts used are accurate and complete and their mode of composition

14 _{For John Bird, see Sir Humphrey Davy Rolleston, The Cambridge Medical}

School: a Biographical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1932) p. 217.

15_{John Bird, ‘To the Judicious Reader’, in Hall, Select Observations, 1st edn,} sig. A6r.

taken into account. This is not a purely theoretical argument, as the two following examples show.

Doreen Nagy used Hall’s treatment of acute urinary retention (John Smith, Case 66) with diuretic herbs and local heat applied to the perineum by a hot fried onion as an illustration of cures

available to both learned and other practitioners.16 _{Nagy wrote of}

this, that ‘Doctors’ records ... illustrate the striking similarity between their treatments and those used by lay practitioners’, but gave no evidence for this treatment being used by anyone other than Hall.17 _{She seems to have taken it as self-evident that a}

therapy based on fried onions must be rooted in popular tradition. Hall in fact took this remedy almost verbatim from Ruland the Elder’s Curationum, so despite appearances it is part of the learned Latin medical armamentarium.

Wendy Churchill supports her argument that melancholy and the mother co-existed with a quotation from Select Observations

(Mrs Peerse, Case 123).18_,19 _{Cooke’s words are that ‘from her}

Melancholy she fell into the Mother’, but Hall’s Latin reads ‘ob maerorem in suffocationem matricis incidebat’ (on account of grief she fell into a suffocation of the mother). In two other reports Hall used maeror for the emotion of a parent at the loss of a child. Lady Browne’s scurvy (Case 162) was brought on by grief at the death of her daughter. Similarly Bishop Thornborough’s grief over his son’s suicide caused first severe melancholy and then scurvy (Case 164).

16 _{Nagy, Popular Medicine, p. 44.} 17 _{Ibid., p. 43.}

18 _{Churchill, Female Patients, p. 189.}

19 _{‘The mother’ means illness caused by supposed movement of the womb} from its normal place within the abdomen. See Appendix D for more details.

Melancholy and grief are not synonymous. The report on Lady Browne’s illness describes melancholy in a way which brings out its physicality:

The source of scurvy in the spleen produces a flatulent

melancholy, since the regions of the hypochondria encircle the spleen. The melancholy bubbles up in the meseraic veins around the pancreas and putrefies as if it were fermenting.20

In these illnesses, as with Mrs Peerse’s, the relationship is between a strong emotion (grief) and physical illness (melancholy and/or scurvy). This is not to deny Churchill’s argument for a relationship between melancholy and the mother. Another report is much more supportive of Churchill’s argument in Hall’s manuscript. Hall made the relationship between the mother and melancholy explicit in another report (Mrs Baker, Case 127) which is headed ‘cure of a fit of the mother, that is, melancholy’.21 _{Cooke’s translation loses this}

close link (‘troubled with the Mother, Melancholy’).22 _{The issue is a}

complex one involving powerful emotions interacting with illnesses which had both physical and psychological components.