(The Inventory, or the Great [work on] Surgery)
Guy de Chauliac
1363
Book 5, Chapter 8
Original Latin text
Middle English translation
Note by Jon Miles:
Advice on treating coccyx pain was given by physicians in imperial Rome, and passed on by various authors over the centuries.
The transmission of the advice on treating coccydynia continued in Guy du Chauliac’s Inventarium Sive Chirurgia Magna, completed in 1363 in Avignon, France. This work was translated into several European languages, including an anonymous fifteenth century translation into Middle English, in which the advice on treating a broken coccyx closely matches the modern translation of Albucasis (though the instructions for removal of the coccyx are omitted):
‘If the uttermeste bone forsothe of the croupe be broken, putte the thombe of thi left hande into the foundement and arighte the broken bone with that other hand after that it is possible. Afterward putte on it a plaster and splentz and streyne it with byndinge.’