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The most important and influential discovery was the practice of surgery. With this invention, human life became more sophisticated, humans lived longer, and we obtained a knowledge of ourselves sufficient enough to break the boundaries built by ignorance. Lacking prescription drugs, accurate tools, computer technology, and any background experience to build from, our ancestors struggled to learn how to repair the human body. They did an suprisingly competent job of treating the sick and injured. Some of the medical technology developed in ancient times surpassed anything available in the modern world until the 18 th century or 19 th century.
In eras wherein religious views took precedence over medicine and logic, surgical advancement was difficult. The knowledge we have now was obtained from these peoples exploits. The first known medical procedure is called trephination. Trephination is the cutting of a hole through ones skull to relive excess pressure. This dates back to as early as the Stone Age, around 3, 000 BC.
Unearthed remains of successful brain operations, as well as surgical instruments, were found in France at one of Europe's noted archeological digs. The success rate was remarkable, even around 7, 000 BC. Skulls have been found from about 8, 000 BC with these telltale holes, most of which are exact and show growth, meaning that patients often lived for weeks, even months, afterwards. Pre-historic evidence of brain surgery was not limited to Europe. Early Incan civilization used brain surgery as an extensive practice as early as 2, 000 BC. In Paracas, Peru, archeological evidence indicates that brain surgery was used frequently.
Here, too, an inordinate success rate was noted as patients were restored to health. The treatment was used to treat mental illnesses they blamed on evil spirits, epilepsy, headaches, and osteomyelitis, as well as head injuries. Brain surgery was also used for both spiritual and magical reasons; often, the practice was limited to kings, priests and the nobility. Surgical tools in South America were made of both bronze and carved obsidian.
The Akkadians used trephination thousands of years later for the same purposes, and the practice was improved until it reached the state of today. The Akkadians learned from experience with surgery. There were no books or documentations of previous procedures, so the trade was passed down through hands on, personal training. The Code of Hamurabi states that surgeons of the Akkadian era were well paid, but a failure was expensive. Surgeons who did not cure or even killed their patients, if only by accident, paid the patients family with money or their lives, depending on the social class involved.
Laws 215 through 223 provide information on physicians duties and payments. These laws were often strict and binding. Law number 218 is as follows: 218. If a physician makes a large incision with the operating knife, and kills him, or opens a tumor with the operating knife, and cuts out the eye, his hands shall be cut off.
The Code of Hamurabi is also the first documentation of surgery. It describes delicate work with bronze lancets and knives and steps for setting bones. The Akkadians use primarily the same manner to set bones as we do in the 21 st century. The earliest written reference to cataract surgery is found in Sanskrit manuscripts dating from the 5 th century BC. They are thought to have been written by the Hindu surgeon Sushruta. He practiced a type of cataract surgery known as couching, in which the cataracts lens was removed from the pupil to lie in the vitreous cavity in the back of the eye.
This displacement of the lens enabled the patient to see better. Vision, however, was still blurred because of the unavailability of corrective lenses. A typical operation performed by Sushruta for removing cataracts is described below. "It was a bright morning. The surgeon sat on a bench which was as high as his knees. The patient sat opposite on the ground so that the doctor was at a comfortable height for doing the operation on the patient's eye. After having taken bath and food, that patient had been tied so that he could not move during the operation.
The doctor warmed the patient's eye with the breath of his mouth. He rubbed the closed eye of the patient with his thumb and then asked the patient to look at his knees. The patient's head was held firmly. The doctor held the lancet between his fore-finger, middle-finger and thumb and introduced it into the patient's eye towards the pupil, half a finger's breadth from the black of the eye and a quarter of a finger's breadth from the outer corner of the eye. He moved the lancet gracefully back and forth and upward. There was a small sound and a drop of water came out.
The doctor spoke a few words to comfort the patient and moistened the eye with milk. He scratched the pupil with the tip or the lancet, without hurting, and then drove the 'slime' towards the nose. The patient got rid of the 'slime' by drawing it into his nose. It was a matter of joy for the patient that the could see objects through his operated eye and the doctor drew the lancet out slowly. He then laid cotton soaked in fat on the wound and the patient lay still with the operated eye bandaged. It was the patient's left eye and the doctor used his right hand for the operation. " The first written description of the cataract and its treatment in the West appears in 29 AD in On Medicine, the work of the Latin encyclopedist Cornelius Celsus.
Physicians used his book for 1, 700 years. In the Western world, recent excavations in Babylonia, Greece, and Egypt have uncovered bronze instruments that would have been appropriate for cataract surgery. As recently as the middle of this century, couching was still practiced in Egypt, India, and Tibet. Although modern plastic surgery began in the 1700 s, its roots go as early as 3400 BC when the Egyptians first attempted facial reconstruction. It was not until the 6 th century BC that the skill evolved. Sushruta Samhita invented this improved form of facial surgery.
He devised what came to be known as the pedicle flap method of plastic surgery as a solution for the punishment for adultery - the cutting off of the nose. In the procedure, tissue from one part of the body was sewed onto another to repair defects. Skin transplanted to the nose area was kept alive by remaining attached to healthy tissue. As the Sushruta Samhita explained: "When a man's nose has been cut off or destroyed, the physician takes the leaf of a plant which is the size of the destroyed parts. He places it on the patient's cheek and cuts out of this cheek a piece of skin of the same size (but in such a manner that the skin at one end remains attached to the cheek). Then he freshens with his scalpel the edges of the stump of the nose and wraps the piece of skin from the cheek carefully all around it, and sews it at the edges.
Then he places two thin pipes in the nose where the nostrils should go, to facilitate breathing and to prevent the sewn skin from collapsing. There after he strews powder of san wood, licorice-root and barberry on it and covers with cotton. As soon as the skin has grown together with the nose, he cuts through the connection with the cheek. Modern surgeons have never found better substitutes for Sushruta's techniques. The modern plastic surgery we use today was learned by the British while they worked for the East India Company. Although the pedicle flap was developed over 2, 000 years ago, it is the same procedure that the British learned.
The practice of medicine was fairly advanced in Ancient Egypt, with Egyptian physicians having a widespread and excellent reputation. The Egyptians thought that most illnesses - at least those caused by no obvious accident - were the work of divine powers, and it was for this reason that magicians, as well as physicians, were concerned with medicine. Much documentation exists that in addition to magicians, useful in the villages and countryside, there existed a much less primitive form of medicine. Texts of the time frequently mention doctors, oculists, dentists and other specialists, including veterinarians.
The practices of Egyptian physicians ranged from embalming, to faith healing, to surgery, to...
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Research essay sample on Brain Surgery Plastic Surgery
