[Demetrius Cantemir in the history of surgery: the first account of transabdominal approach to repair groin hernias].

The first description of the transabdominal approach for hernia repair was written by Demetrius Cantemir, Prince of Moldavia and encyclopedic scholar, in his 1716 Latin manuscript "Incrementa et Decrementa Aulae Othmanicae". This manuscript was one of the most important of Eastern Europe at the time. It was first translated in English in 1734, and all subsequent translations into various other languages were based on this English version. The original manuscript now belongs to the Houghton Library of Harvard University, where it was recently rediscovered in 1984 by V. Candea. D. Sluşanschi has made the first Romanian translation of the first two volumes based on the original latin manuscript. This translation is now in press. Our article presents for the first time a fragment of this Romanian translation from the Annotations of Volume two, chapter four. In this fragment, Demetrius Cantemir describes the surgical procedure practiced by Albanian physicians in the prince's palace in Constantinopol. The patient was the secretary of the prince. There is a detailed description of the postsurgical therapy and the medical course to recovery. It was first partially reproduced by Mercy in his book on hernia published in 1892, and more recently by Meade in 1965. We consider useful to present to the medical community this valuable but less known contribution to the history of medicine.