Advancements in Surgery
Overview
During the Renaissance, between 1450 and 1699, surgery was a mix of art, science, and myth. The art of caring for a soldier's battle wounds, the myth of blood-letting to cure or prevent disease, and the advances in scientific surgery for breast cancer, hernias, and bladder stones were all common to surgery at this time. It became a period for advancing the science of surgery as new ways to control bleeding were developed, plastic surgery was invented, complex surgeries to remove stones in the bladder were beginning to be performed, and surgeons tried their steady hands at cesarean sections with living mothers.
While significant improvements in surgical techniques and publications came from Italian, German, and French surgeons, such as Fabricius Hildanus (1560-1634) and Ambroise Paré (1510?-1590)—who dominated the field in the 1500s—British physicians such as William Harvey (1578-1657) made significant discoveries in anatomy during the 1600s that would make surgeries in the 1700s more successful.
Background
In the fifteenth century, blood letting (or phlebotomy) already had a long surgical history. The barber's red and white pole became a symbol of bleeding and bandaging and the practice of bleeding persisted well into the eighteenth century, as surgeons and barbers promoted health by periodically "thinning" the blood by bleeding.
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