Surgery

Bleeding lancet (3)

   Surgeons used to buy their instruments from knife manufacturers, French "coutelliers". So I think it is completely normal for them to rummage through their wife's sewing-box every now and then, in search of a particularly fine instrument.

  Noble patients were undoubtedly treated with particularly fine instruments - hardly imaginable that the woman Marquise was with the same knife to the vein as the miller servant.

  The same care should have been exercised in the preparation of corpses: the closer one of the bodies to be prepared had been to life, the more reverentially he was moved to his body after his death. Last obeisance for a nobleman, a lodge-brother: during her embalming the taxidermist used an instrument which he never used before ...