The first is Dr. John Clark, who is said
by tradition to have been the first regularly educated physician who
resided in New England. His portrait, in close-fitting skull-cap, with
long locks and venerable flowing beard, is familiar to our eyes on the
wall of our Society's antechamber. His left hand rests upon a skull, his
right hand holds an instrument which deserves a passing comment. It is a
trephine, a surgical implement for cutting round pieces out of broken
skulls, so as to get at the fragments which have been driven in, and lift
them up. It has a handle like that of a gimlet, with a claw like a
hammer, to lift with, I suppose, which last contrivance I do not see
figured in my books. But the point I refer to is this: the old
instrument, the trepan, had a handle like a wimble, what we call a brace
or bit-stock. The trephine is not mentioned at all in Peter Lowe's book,
London, 1634; nor in Wiseman's great work on Surgery, London, 1676; nor
in the translation of Dionis, published by Jacob Tonson, in 1710. In fact
it was only brought into more general use by Cheselden and Sharpe so late
as the beginning of the last century. As John Clark died in 1661, it is
remarkable to see the last fashion in the way of skull-sawing
contrivances in his hands,--to say nothing of the claw on the handle, and
a Hey's saw, so called in England, lying on the table by him, and painted
there more than a hundred years before Hey was born.
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