Spatula Mundani (original) (raw)

The Spatula Mundani was a surgical device invented in the 17th century by the London surgeon James Woodall to treat extreme cases of severe constipation where purgatives had failed. Woodall believed that the cause of this malady was from scurvy, but speculation is that many of the cases were from the abuse of laudanum, a popular painkiller of the time. A drawing of the device is found in his 1617 book The Surgeons Mate. The term mundani is apparently derived from the archaic term mundify which appeared in a dictionary from 1604 with the definition "to make clean".