A Brief Illustrated History of Medicine – A Philatelic Presentation
by Carmel Lino Cutajar, published by Progress Press, Malta

As a science, medicine has only began making itself look respectable over the last few hundred years. For long centuries, what today is one of the major flag-bearers of fact-based rationality, was almost entirely in the hands of quacks and charlatans.

Of well-meaning impostors who sold hope, fantasies and improbable medicaments to a captive market of sufferers and patients. Learning did not flow from rigorous experimentation and triple-checked research, but mostly from faith, superstitions, traditions based on ignorance and ignorance fortified by tradition. Life, and its most valuable accomplice, health, mostly relied on incompetent do-gooders for support.

Lino Cutajar has distinguished himself in two areas: he dedicated a significant working life to surgery as a profession and adopted philately with equal passion and competence as a hobby.

Later in life he has now united the two interests in matrimony. The results are pressed between the covers of this book – a history of medicine illustrated almost exclusively through postage stamps issued throughout the world.

Signed anatomical drawing by Giuseppe Calì. Private collection, Malta

Excellent histories of medicine are not lacking, either targeting the specialist or the merely inquisitive. Personally, I hide under the second umbrella together with the great unwashed. I have read many of the books by Roy Porter, fascinating histories of medicine or of some of its branches.

Cutajar’s work is different. It gives a dazzlingly clear narrative of how the art of healing progressed through the centuries, from its faltering dead-ends in the beginning, to the vast social phenomenon it has become today; the difference from other good histories of medicine lies in the fact that this book, is abundantly illustrated by images culled, in their majority, from postage stamps. 

Our islands have been fortunate in having its own committed chroniclers of the history of medicine in Malta, like Paul Cassar and Charles Savona-Ventura. Cutajar has provided the handy and easily accessible manual that places these domestic medical histories, geographically in a world context and historically, against the huge backdrop of time.

Cutajar’s work gives a dazzlingly clear narrative of how the art of healing progressed through the centuries

Fine anatomical drawing of a hip bone by Antoine Favray. Private collection, Malta

Malta is also fortunate to have contributed prominent names to the pantheon of medical science, like Michelangelo Grima (whose image sadly never honoured a postage stamp), Giuseppe Barth, Sir Luigi Preziosi, and Sir Temi Zammit.

Zammit – archaeologist, scientist, historian and man of letters, brings me to one of the mystifications in the history of medicine – and how Sir David Bruce misappropriated the groundwork of Zammit and Giuseppe Caruana Scicluna to claim the laurels of man’s victory over Brucellosis – named after him.

Bruce, a relapser, was hardly a novice in this sleight of hand – poaching the findings of his subordinates and claiming them as his own. He had already done exactly the same in Africa with the discoveries of Aldo Castellani. Malta was also fortunate in being able to supply first-hand materials for the writing of the history of medicine and epidemics. When the great plague broke out in Malta in 1592, Grand Master Verdalle, finding the local medics dismally inadequate, sent for a renowned Sicilian physician to take over.

Postage stamp derived from card sold to raise funds for the wounded in World War 1 by Edward Caruana Dingli.

In 1603, Pietro Parisi published in Palermo his voluminous observations on the plague in Malta Aggiunta agli avvertimenti sopra la peste, over 400 pages long if I recall, a veritable goldmine for the historian of medicine.

Other major names in the history of medicine have a Malta connection, like the holy Dane, Niels Stensen, the great anatomist who discovered the parotid gland, mapped the myocardium and was one of the first to dissect the brain.

Stensen joined the debate then engrossing scientific Europe as to whether the fossilised sharks’ teeth found in Malta and which claimed unsurpassed curative power in Europe, were a natural phenomenon or a divine gift to the faithful. Stensen disowned all  divine intervention and saw only the laws of nature at work. The irony is that the deists are today all forgotten, while the God-denier was canonised to sainthood in 1988.

Anatomy has been seriously studied in Malta since early days. Tangential evidence of this are the amazing anatomical drawings prepared for students of surgery by Antoine Favray and later by Giuseppe Calì, which have, so far, not been studied sufficiently. An obvious scientific interest by a Hospitaller Order makes it difficult to understand why Inquisitor Evangelista Carbonesi, in 1609, ordered the public burning of the greatest masterpiece of anatomical imagery of all times: Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica.

A history of medicine very obviously leans towards Europe and Europe-dependent cultures. But Cutajar was right in not ignoring other sources and streams of learning. Like the primacy in surgery of ancient India, over 2,000 years ago. The middle ages would have been poorer without the great Arab medical savants.

They all contributed to make medicine the composite flower of genius it is today. This book illustrates, with admirable clarity and accuracy, the tormented meanderings of these rivers of learning, in their broad outlines. One area in which philately crossed the paths of medicine was in postal disinfection. Malta, almost certainly coincidentally, stands out as a prime European example in times of pandemics.

Stamps showing Sir Temi Zammit, Sir Luigi Preziosi, Edward Jenner, William Harvey and Giuseppe Barth.

Paper was deemed to be a vicious carrier of infection, and the local postal authorities, through the Malta Lazzaretto, acquired renown in Europe as exemplary and state-of-the-art fumigation and disinfection centres in the Mediterranean.

During the lethal 1813 plague, Malta even introduced the writing of letters, receipts and wills on wooden surfaces. Totally futile waste of resources, but you can’t say they didn’t try.

Drawing for the teaching of anatomy by Antoine Favray. Private collection, Malta

When reviewing books, I feel that fault-finding should be an imperative – to dispel any suggestion of pre-programmed flattery. I genuinely could not home on much. Perhaps an Anglo-centric bias? Now I’ll be the first to subscribe to the outstanding British contributions to science and medicine. But others were generous too.

Was it William Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood? Andrea Cesalpino had written all about the principle of circulation in great detail 60 years earlier, though his dynamics were not always accurate. Was it Edward Jenner who discovered the benefits of vaccination against smallpox? It had been practiced successfully in the Ottoman empire centuries earlier. 

It is, admittedly, impossible to list all the intellectual giants who made modern medicine possible. But a mention of some great non-Brits, like, Girolamo Fracastoro (transmission of syphilis), Gabriele Falloppio (Fallopian tube), Lazzaro Spallanzani (artificial insemination and gastric juices), Francesco Folli (blood transfusions), would have been complementary. Not to mention the Branco surgeons, Gustavo father and Antonio son, the Vianeo brothers, Pietro and Paolo, and Gaspare Tagliacozzi who perfected Indian nose-job surgery in the 16th century.

President George Vella, himself a philatelist, in his foreword states that this book “makes absorbing reading”. I can’t not second that wholeheartedly. Though its pages are essentially a distressing inventory of much that can go wrong with the human body, I guarantee you will find it quite compelling. Add to this the incentive that any profit from its sales, I am told, goes to charity. What more can you want?

A Brief Illustrated History of Medicine can be purchased from Merlin Library at Blata l-Bajda and Sliema.