While the physician held open the two lids, his wife attempted to withdraw the steel with the magnet held close to the cornea, and after several efforts she was successful--which Hildanes enumerates as one of the advantages of being a married man.
Hildanes was particularly happy in his inventions of surgical instruments, many of which were designed for locating and removing the various missiles recently introduced in warfare.
The seventeenth century, which was such a flourishing one for anatomy and physiology, was not as productive of great surgeons or advances in surgery as the sixteenth had been or the eighteenth was to be.

There was a gradual improvement all along the line, however, and much of the work begun by such surgeons as Pare and Hildanes was perfected or improved.
Perhaps the most progressive surgeon of the century was an Englishman, Richard Wiseman (1625-1686), who, like Harvey, enjoyed royal favor, being in the service of all the Stuart kings.

He was the first surgeon to advocate primary amputation, in gunshot wounds, of the limbs, and also to introduce the treatment of aneurisms by compression; but he is generally rated as a conservative operator, who favored medication rather than radical operations, where possible.
In Italy, Marcus Aurelius Severinus (1580-1656) and Peter Marchettis (1589-1675) were the leading surgeons of their nation.

Like many of his predecessors in Europe, Severinus ran amuck with the Holy Inquisition and fled from Naples.

But the waning of the powerful arm of the Church is shown by the fact that he was brought back by the unanimous voice of the grateful citizens, and lived in safety despite the frowns of the theologians.
The sixteenth century cannot be said to have added much of importance in the field of practical medicine, and, as in the preceding and succeeding centuries, was at best only struggling along in the wake of anatomy, physiology, and surgery.