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Updated: May 21, 2025
At times the angina causes such swelling in the throat that the breathing is interfered with completely. For this Arculanus' master, Rhazes, advised tracheotomy. Arculanus himself, however, apparently hesitated about that. It is not surprising, then, to find that Arculanus is very explicit in his treatment of affections of the uvula.
Arculanus is particularly full in his directions for the preservation of the teeth. We are rather prone to think that prophylaxis is comparatively a modern idea, and that most of the principles of conservation of human tissues and the prevention of deterioration and disease are distinctly modern.
Besides, his position as Papal Physician and Professor of Anatomy at the Papal Medical School at Rome gave him opportunities for original investigation, such as were not easily obtained elsewhere. Arculanus can scarcely be blamed, therefore, for not having anticipated the Renaissance, and we must take him as merely the culmination of medieval knowledge with regard to anatomy and surgery.
All this is so modern in many ways that we might expect a detailed exact knowledge of the anatomy of the teeth and even something of their embryology from Arculanus. It must not be forgotten, however, that coming as he does before the Renaissance, the medical sciences in the true sense of the word are as yet unborn.
Arculanus describes it as a preternatural elongation of the uvula which sometimes goes to such an extent as to make it resemble the tail of a mouse. For shorter elongations he suggests the cautery; for longer, excision followed by the cautery so that the greater portion of the extending part may be cut off.
The ends of this are then pulled on backward and forward after the fashion of a saw. Arculanus remarks evidently with the air of a man who has tried it and not been satisfied that this operation is quite uncertain, and seems to depend a great deal on chance, and much reliance must not be placed on it.
As might be expected, then, it is with regard to the practical treatment and general consideration of ailments of the teeth that Giovanni of Arcoli is most interesting. In this some of his chapters contain a marvellous series of surprises. Arculanus was probably born towards the end of the fourteenth century.
He is famous principally for being the first we know who mentions the filling of teeth with gold. It might possibly be suggested that coming at this time Arculanus should rather be reckoned as a Maker of Medicine in the Renaissance than as belonging to the Middle Ages and its influences.
Arculanus suggests a substitute method by which latent polyps or occult polyps as he calls them may be removed.
After Guy de Chauliac the next important contributor to dentistry is Giovanni of Arcoli, often better known by his Latin name, Johannes Arculanus, who was a professor of medicine and surgery at Bologna and afterwards at Padua, just before and after the middle of the fifteenth century, and who died in 1484.
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