Abstract
SURGERY or chirurgery is the handicraft of healing. It has always been an art, but only during the past hundred years has it become a science. In pre–historic and early historic tunes the craft must have been almost exclusively exercised upon the victims of inter–tribal war. The earliest crude knowledge of anatomy may have come from skulls cleft by the battle–axe, or chests or abdomens ripped open by spear or sword; and in like manner from the time of earliest combat primitive man must have learned various ways of dressing wounds, extracting arrows or spear–heads from wounds, or applying some form of crude splint to a broken limb. By the time of Hippocrates various methods of practical value had been learnt by experience and were generally taught, but for more than two thousand years little definite advance was made in the art of surgery. Garrison states that through even the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surgical instruction was so poor that all authorities agreed that war was the only field in which surgery could be learned. The knowledge thus gained was crude, ill co–ordinated, and only advanced by the rough method of trial and error.
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COPE, V. INFLUENCE OF WAR UPON SURGERY. Nature 148, 577–580 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148577a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148577a0