Surgery has a long history in the healing arts. Its history dates back thousands of years to the great seats of early civilization in Athens, Rome, and Alexandria. However, amputations and invasive wound-healing procedures can even be traced to Upper...

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...

Surgeons of the twentieth century inherited many ideas and techniques from earlier physicians, which they continued to investigate and improve. Three age-old problems that plagued surgeons—pain, infection, and shock—were beginning to be...

The science of surgical care has advanced further in the last 50 years than it has in all preceding years combined. Complicated procedures such as natural and artificial organ transplants, xenotransplants (organs transplanted from non-human animals),...

Surgery is an ancient branch of medicine, but it was not until the nineteenth century that doctors learned to apply practical and effective measures for controlling pain and preventing surgical infection. New techniques for anesthesia and antisepsis...

Early in twelfth century pre-Renaissance European surgery and medical practice began to mature, in large part through the heavy influence of ancient Greek texts and the work of Arabic physicians and surgeons. Medical scholarship and practice became...

Branch of medicine concerned with treatment by physical means rather than drugs. In addition to operations requiring access to the inside of the body (open surgery), it includes manipulation from outside the body (e.g., setting of a broken bone, skin...

A good surgeon has an eagle’s eye, a lion’s heart, and a lady’s hand. (English) A good surgeon must have soft words and a firm hand. (Spanish) Call not a surgeon before you are wounded....

In medicine, surgery (from the Greek χειρουργική, or chirurgical, and latin chirurgiae meaning "hand work") is a medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological...