The anatomical and historical background of surgery: major surgical achievements during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Abstract

Anatomy constitutes the historical and epistemological background of surgery and surgery, in turn, is the area of medicine dealing with the management of injuries and pathologies by means of manual interventions and instrumental devices. As such, surgery may be considered as old as mankind. However, only in the Age of Enlightenment (eighteenth century) was the rigid and negative distinction typical of the past between clinical medicine and surgery overcome. This historical differentiation is by many historians of Western medicine ascribed to the famous Hippocratic Oath, a deontological text attributed to the Hippocratic School (V-IV centuries B.C.). The object of this contribution is the description of the evolution of surgery in the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, periods in which a number of fundamental acquisitions in surgical practice were gained, ranging from a more correct treatment of wounds and lesions to the elaboration of the first effective methods for vessel ligature, from the improvement of amputation techniques to the refinement of trauma surgery, from the major progress in human anatomical knowledge to the invention of new surgical devices, including the obstetrical forceps. Last but not least, the achievement on the part of surgeons of a more codified professional role, their acquisition of a more honourable deontological profile and the definition of their clearer collocation in the sanitary panorama, appear as paramount historical-epistemological achievements typical of the surgery practiced during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.