Milestones in surgery

ABSTRACT

This essay highlights the origins of surgery and its development as a separate speciality. Surgery and medicine have developed along separate routes throughout history, but have occasionally been drawn together as complementary approaches to the art of healing. Surgical methods were practised by the earliest civilisations and often so skillfully that it evidently benefited patients in relieving their pain and suffering. From these earliest beginnings, surgical skills have evolved to what we generally regard as the excellence of present day practice. These developments have gone hand in hand with developments in such related fields as anaesthesia, asepsis and antibiotics, The advances of the latter part of the twentieth century have relied very much on the rapid developments in imaging methods: