Medical Specialties
Surgery
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Origin Practiced in some form since antiquity; the Edwin Smith Papyrus (c. 1600 BCE Egypt) is among the oldest surviving surgical texts, and the field was transformed into its modern form in the nineteenth century by anesthesia and antisepsis.
Surgery is the branch of medicine that treats disease, injury or deformity by operative manual and instrumental intervention on the body. Its recorded history reaches back to antiquity, from trepanation and Egyptian wound treatises through the anatomical and antiseptic reforms of the nineteenth century that made complex internal operations survivable for the first time. This atlas records what the historical record supports about the fields development and is not medical advice.
Facts
Origin PeriodPracticed in some form since antiquity; the Edwin Smith Papyrus (c. 1600 BCE Egypt) is among the oldest surviving surgical texts, and the field was transformed into its modern form in the nineteenth century by anesthesia and antisepsis. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Notable Specialists
Vesalius held the chair of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua and taught anatomy through public human dissection.
Galen, Healers Galen's post as physician to gladiators and his advanced, if animal-derived, work on brain and eye surgery were surgical in nature, though his broader medical writing ranged far beyond surgery alone.
Hippocratic treatises including On Fractures and On the Articulations are among the earliest systematic surgical texts.
Founding physician William Stewart Halsted established the modern American surgical residency system at the hospital.
Mayo Clinic's founding physicians William James and Charles Horace Mayo built the practice's early reputation on surgical outcomes and pioneered group-practice surgical case review.
The movement's founding purpose, following Henry Dunant's account of Solferino, was organized care for battlefield wounded, historically a matter of field surgery.
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