After a very long time I am back with another 'short history of...'I was writing about plastic surgery and about psychiatry , and if you are interested into that, you can read it by simply clicking on those two links.

To me, articles like that are very interesting, and a couple days ago I remebered them and I was thinking about why I have never written anything about surgery. I mean, it is very interestring and it was there before those who branches of medicine.

Surgery is very interesting and very useful for the whole world. People since the beginning of time are in need for it. People are having various deseases and injuries, and they need operations, that is why we can follow the history of surgery since the beginning of time. Of course, we cannot talk about surgery that we know nowadays, but we can talk about some attempts that people were making.

We can say that in some situations people were desperate because of their diseases and injuries and that is what made them try to operate each other and save lives.

It is important to say that surgery was developing very fast in some periods and very slow in some other periods. Those periods, when it was developing super fast were, as you can guess, wars. During wars doctors were faced to much more injuries than in periods of peace, and they had much more space to develop, to make experiments and to make some very good things. During wars doctors invented many methods and many instruments that surgery is using and developing during the time.

When we are talking about stages of surgery, we can split it to some big periods.

Prehistory and Anceint World

First period that we should mention here is definitely the prehistory. During this period we cannot talk about some operations and some procedures that people were trying to develop. They were just doing some simple things thanks to their instincts. For example tooth that is hurting was pulled out, abscess was opened, wounds were washed with water and covered with leaves or fabrics. Simple solutions for simple problems.

It is interesting to say that in the ancient Babylon sick person was on the forum, and everyone, who was passing by could come and help.

In ancient Egypt they were opening up skulls of hurt people. Also, they were doing amputations of hurt limbs. Also, we all know about mumies and how they were embalmed. Before that procedure organs were taken out of the body, which means that they knew much about anatomy and human body. But, they were not operating much because in that period people had no anesthetics.

Anesthetics are extremely important for surgery. You simply cannot open up a man without anesthetic. That would kill that person. Cutting human's stomach hurts enough to kill a person. That is why complicated operations are risky without anesthetics.

Corus Hipocraticum is one of the most important books about surgery of ancient world. As you can guess it was written by Greek doctor Hipocrat. He invented some very important things that we are still using nowadays. One of them is immobilization, which is not a part of surgery, but it is important for surgery. It allows us to do the operations. Moving a person who is hurt can do a lot of damage, and if that happens the operation can be pointless.

Middle Age

Next big period is middle age, and as you know it is also known as the dark age. Science was not in a good position and of course surgery and whole medicine. Diring this age religion was very important in the whole world, and thanks to that surgery was not developing a lot.

Cauterization of wounds was very popular in this period. Cauterization is a process of burning the edges of wounds in order to stop bleading and kill bacteria. But, if the wound is bigger or deeper that can be a big problem. Maybe you will stop bleeding, but you can also make all the bacteria get into the wound, because you cannot burn the whole wound.

At the end of the middle age surgery developed a lot. Church gave the permission for autopsies and that helped a lot, because doctors found out a lot about anatomy.

But also barbers got the permission to do the job of the doctors and surgeons, which degraded medicine as a science.

Renaissance and Modern Age

During this period we had a lot of wars and we had a lot of freedom which leaded to the great development of surgery. As I said before surgery develops a lot during great wars.

During this period we had many scientists, who discovered many important things, and one of the most important is definitely the discovery of anesthetics in 1844. That was not perfect, but it was much better for anesthesia than all atempst before.

Before this people were using alcohol as anesthetic, opium, lowering the body temperature and many other things that were not good at all and sometimes were doing only damage to hurt people.

Nowadays, people are operating everything, doctors are saving lives every single day. Surgery is one of the most important things we have nowadays. Saving human lives is the biggest thing that one person can do. But, surgeons cannot operate if they do not have optimal conditions, that is why other branches of science have to develop and to find things that can help surgery to be better and better.

That was it for this article, this short history is very short, but if you are interested into this topic, I can write about some branches of surgery, like I was writting about plastic surgery.

This is very wide topic and because of that I gave my best to write it here as short as possible.

See you soon,

SuncicaZ!