Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 January 1917 — SURGERY AN ANCIENT CRAFT [ARTICLE]

SURGERY AN ANCIENT CRAFT

Surgery was already an art when medicine was only , a phase of superstition, the earliest record of surgery having been found among the Egyptians in a period about 3000 B. C. In z European museums are Instruments, lancets, tweezers, iron rods for cauter„iziition. andother -things used tian practitioners. Jewish and Greek surgery immediately followed that of the Egyptians, and surgery was held- In- high-esteem among the Indians at a remote ..age, as ' prerved “by Tlieir ancient proverb, "A physician who is no surgeon is like a bird with but one wing.” Instruments npvv on exhibition at Madras, Calcutta lAd Alexandria afford evidence of their skill. In Greece surgery had attained high proficiency long before the day of Hippocrates, .antl-in one ofliis-worksis found a complete trea’tise on the physician’s operating room, surgical instruments. and appliances, together with inst rm-tion in the correct method of use; on the proper posing of the patient, and the U,se of water and handages. Then follows a description of various wounds, from which it would appear that hemorrhages were arrested then, as now, with cold compress Tdr“sfj'ptTcs, while wounds were healed by primary union or suppuration. Lesion of the joints, injuries to the /spine and various kinds of dislocations are dealt with. Hippocrates’ surgery treats instructively on fractures and contusions of the skull. For fractures the standard operation was trephining, Which, in the view of the writer, shouldbe performed as speedily as possible. With the development of Roman surgery from —the —time of Galen, —the variety of instruments used increased to lhe number of 300. Among examples of these now in the museums of Rome and Naples are needles, hollow probes, pincers, cauteries, bistouris, lancets and scissors. For almost a thousand years the treatment of wounds, fractures and dislocations varied by bloodletting, remained unchanged. Under the Byzantines, medical service, appliance for the treatment of disease and wounds, was well organized, cavalry and infantry alike being supplied with a company of surgeons and assistants whose duty it was ,to firing the wounded out of action. . , Strangely enough; surgery, suffering from the general superstitious horror

of the knife, save in conflict, which pervaded the early people of all lands. Continued for many centuries to be despised by physicians, professional standing being denied to the'mien who healed wounds and set fractured limbs. It was not until the sixteenth cen--tnrythat surgery— shared -4n -the- ndvance common to every art and science, its practitioners correspondingly improving their socjal and professional position. In tills refornL the day. was. led by Faris, with her College of Surgeons,' “founded in 1279. Berlin and Rome followed her example 300 years later. r In the eighteenth century London, Edinburgh and Dublin were added to the various centers of surgical learning, while America, leader of all other countries |n these days, laid the foundation of-her--proficiency in the school established by Doctor Shippen at Philadelphia.