Surgery - Ancient Surgeons, The Sponge Of Sleep, Beyond Boiling Oil, A Sanitary Leap Forward, The Modern Era
operative nineteenth types century
Surgery is the part of medicine which employs operative or manual treatment of disease or injury. Although surgery was practiced in ancient times, modern anesthesia was not developed until the nineteenth century. For centuries, most types of operative surgery involved high risk to patients due to infection. With the development of antiseptic surgical methods in the nineteenth century, the risks linked to surgery diminished. Some types of surgery remain risky, but many have high rates of success. Advances in technological knowledge offer new horizons in surgery.
Additional Topics
Traditionally, wars have been the proving ground of surgeons and new types of surgery. Early surgeons developed methods to anesthetize their patients and tools to operate effectively. Because there was no global communication, many surgical advances remained geographically isolated. The Western tradition of medicine developed independently of traditions in India, South America, and elsewhere, alth…
The Roman Catholic Church was the overwhelming authority in Medieval life, dictating everything from worship to medical care. Medical teaching was seen as less important than theology. While the Greeks had idealized good health, Christian doctrine in the Middle Ages considered suffering a potentially valuable entity, which could test one's faith. As a result, the idea of healing the sick wa…
The Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revolutionized medicine. William Harvey (1578-1657) advanced all branches of medicine with his discoveries about circulation of the blood. A fascination with the human body, and the renewed study of anatomy helped forge dramatic advances in the understanding of how the body worked. The era also saw the innovations of great surgeo…
The development of anesthesia cleared the way for more ambitious types of surgery and more careful surgical endeavors. Without the need to operate so quickly, surgeons could focus on operating more carefully. Yet surgery still had not entered the modern era, for infection continued to make recovery treacherous. Patients who survived surgery in the middle nineteenth century continued to face fright…
By the late nineteenth century, surgery was still performed rarely. For example, in 1867, only 3.2% of the hospital admissions involved surgery at the Charity hospital in New Orleans. By 1939, surgery was involved in about 40% of admissions. But surgeons of the nineteenth century broke many barriers. As recently as the 1880s, most surgeons would not intentionally operate on the head, the chest, or…
The emergence of heart surgery in the twentieth century defied earlier beliefs that the heart was inviolate and untouchable. Contemporary surgeons replace hearts in heart transplant operations, create new pathways for the blood using tissue from other parts of the body in coronary bypass operations, and clear out the blood vessels of the heart using special tools in coronary angioplasty. But the s…
But cosmetic plastic surgery has also become popular, and procedures to make breasts larger, noses smaller, and buttocks less saggy have gained in popularity. For example, in 1992, a total of 50,175 procedures for nose reshaping were performed, and 32,607 procedures to increase the size of the breast were performed. Nearly nine out of 10 individuals who received plastic surgery in 2002 were women,…
Contemporary surgeons have taken the concept of surgery well beyond what their counterparts as little as 100 years ago believed to be their domain. One of the most dramatic types of surgery is fetal therapy on the unborn. The first successful effort to address fetal problems in the womb took place in the early 1960s, with the first prenatal blood transfusion. Effective techniques for human fetal s…
Technological advances in robotics and imaging devices suggest dramatic changes in the operating room of the future. Robots have already performed certain procedures in clinical trials. One such trial involves using a robot in surgery to help replace non-functioning hips with a prosthesis. Hip-replacement procedures are commonly performed and have a high rate of success. But surgeons have long bee…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments