Rethinking on ethics and principle of surgery / 中华外科杂志

Surgery is an important part of medicine, it has undergone huge changes in recent decades in China.The concepts of damage control surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and enhanced recovery after surgery are all new with the date, laparoscopic surgery, robotic surgery, natural orifice transluminalendoscopic surgery are not new words to all of us. Surgical operations are becoming more and more specialized, surgical technique is becoming more and more mature, and surgeons are becoming more and more specialized. Medical ethical issues, as the common language of surgeons and basic principle of surgery, should be recognized and understood more stronger than ever, which will enable surgeons to retrieve original intention of surgery. This paper takes this as starting point and explore the common principles of surgery, aims to arouse some mutual encouragement to growing youth surgeons.

Surgical principles of Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

Ibn Sina is one of the famous physicians of Muslim era. He is accepted as Physician par excellence. In his magnum opus, Al-Qanoon, he has collected all the knowledge of medicine from Hindu, Greek and Islamic sources known in tenth-century to eleventh centuries. It includes principles of surgery as well. Though we are not sure how much surgery he did himself as part of his memoirs are lost but he gives the idea of practice of Surgery of the period. In addition to anatomy, physiology and pathology he goes in the management of most surgical problems from head to toe. He is the first to describe the antiseptic properties of wine. We can also attribute to him the first description of Bennet’s fracture and his description of late splintage of fractures, now we now know as described by George Perkins. He had a great influence on the practice of medicine in the later centuries.