Physical Impairment in the First Surgical Handbooks Printed in Germany

From a modern point of view, surgery represents the natural form of intervention on different kinds of physical impairment and it can contribute, if not to heal them completely, at least to mitigate them. However, the assumption that surgery could represent the solution to pathologies resulting, for example, in lameness or blindness doesn’t seem to be automatically valid for earlier stages of the history of medicine and surgery. In this contribution I take into consideration two German surgical handbooks – Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia (Strasburg, 14971) and Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Strasburg, 15171) – and their treatment of physical impairment. These two treaties – mainly compilations of different Classical, Arabic, Medieval and Late Medieval authorities – represent the first vernacular surgical handbooks which were printed in Germany. On the basis of a lexical analysis of the terms used to indicate these conditions of disability and to describe the procedures adopted to mitigate them, I try to ascertain which forms of impairment Brunschwig and von Gersdorff considered surgically treatable, and which not. Once identified the forms of disability which could, according to the two authors, be healed surgically, the procedures suggested for each of them are presented.