Pompei
Pompei
Pompei

Antique medicine


Speculum from Pompei

Pompei 1
 

 

Underwood & Underwood was founded in 1881 in Ottawa, Kansas, by the brothers Elmer Underwood and Bert Elias Underwood. In 1887, the flourishing company moved to New York. In 1895 the company made several recordings in Italy, i.a. one in the Museum of Naples, where the artefacts from the "surgeon's house" from Pompeii were kept and exhibited.

While all the photographs in historical books are two-dimensional, Underwood's photographs convey a three-dimensional view of the objects - they appear "within reach".

 

 


Legitimate (?) Doubt the Roman origin of these instruments is the engineer Andreas Tschurilow, who lives in Deggendorf / Bavaria, who believes to be able to present evidence that Pompei was still inhabited in the 17th century. In particular, it disturbs the thread of the speculum uteri.


As far as I know, screws with square nuts only appeared at the end of the Renaissance and were made only manually with files.The first project of a workbench for the manufacture of screws was offered by Besson (France) in 1569. But his idea in the Only a watchmaker named Hindli (England) put the practice into practice in 1741. Leonardo da Vinci has preserved a sketch of a further developed machine - the prototype of a top lathe - and he had several revolutionary ideas: firstly, with the help of a set of gear wheels Secondly, the thread chisel was not in the worker's hand, but fixed in the tool carriage, thirdly a constant direction of rotation was used, that is, threads of such quality as I saw in the Neapolitan Museum can not be used earlier than Be the end of the 15th century ".

 


So do the instruments come from the workshop of a smith from the 17th century? And did the "Roman surgeon" actually practice in the 17th century?

Origin: Cardiff / UK.