The_Invention_of_Surgery

time.^2 Figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, and
Johannes Gutenberg upended the status quo, much like Steve Jobs, Elon
Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg have done over the last decades
—and not without controversy.
The Renaissance is a convenient starting point to trace the origins of
modernity in medicine, in part because so little had changed from the time
of Hippocrates to the 15th century. Even as the Western world was
awakening from a great, thousand-year sleep, it was still mostly pointless
to consult with a physician, and likely, more dangerous to be under the
care of even the wisest doctor. As is beautifully detailed by David Wootton
in Bad Medicine, a patient inflicted with almost any malady, in any era
before 1865, would have been better served by suffering alone, away from
the “care” of a physician.
Therefore, the two towering figures of Western medicine, Hippocrates
and Galen, had actually done very little to improve the lot of men and
women under their philosophical care for almost two thousand years. And
certainly, they had contributed nothing to the practice of surgery.
Nonetheless, it is critical to understand that these fathers of medicine—
even though they were merely pulling so many levers behind the curtain
like the Great Oz—influenced every Western physician over the last two
thousand years, and so their theories matter.
My undertaking in this work is to explore the metamorphosis of the
understanding of the way the body works, how disease happens, and the
near-miraculous ways 21st-century surgeons can resuscitate, reconstruct,
and even reimagine human beings. I will spend little time examining
ancient Asian medicine, or the oral traditions of healers in primitive
societies. While there may have been surprising perceptions among
antiquity’s shamans, dead-end, unlinked intellectual insights are not the
focus of this work. The foundational breakthroughs that led to the
invention of surgery—from the invention of science itself to the discovery
of cells, germs, modern materials, and outcomes research—is the thrust of
this book.
Stephen Greenblatt, in his enchanting book The Swerve, relates the story
of the near-mythical poem, “On the Nature of Things,” by the Epicurean
poet, Lucretius. Lost to antiquity, the poem was remembered for its
insights and artistry, but no one in the Middle Ages had ever read it. All
that remained were stories about its greatness, similar to the legends of the