Thesoro de la verdadera cirugía y vía particular contra la común (Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero; read in the Barcelona printing of 1624)

A Seville surgeon's argument that head wounds should be closed and dried rather than opened with scraping-irons and trepan drills, made not only from Galen and Hippocrates but from a tally he had drawn off the register of the Hospital del Cardenal: 456 wounded admitted in 1583, 436 discharged healed, 20 dead, and a separate two-and-a-half-month run of head wounds, 57 admitted, 50 healed, 7 dead. The comparison he wanted the numbers to win is the one part he never counted.