The History Of Surgery Development
As medicine progresses, we tend not to worry about illnesses that would have been fatal centuries or even decades ago. A few hundred years ago, a common cold would have caused a person to worry about their life, in the same way a clogged artery would worry a person now. Vaccines, medicine, and surgery have progressed extensively within recent decades, but the practices have been alive for thousands of years. Surgery has only become a common practice recently, with the strict guidelines in hospitals minimizing the risk of malpractice and infection and maximizing success and recovery. It turns out surgery is much older than we expect it to be.
According to this article the earliest cranial surgery has been traced back to the Mesolithic period. Interestingly people also conducted surgery on animals as well, for both educational purposes and healing animals that had complications. Fully intact skulls of cows have been found with holes and can also be related to infections and diseases like syphilis or tuberculosis. They signified this surgical process because the infections were not spreading and there were incision marks indicating that a surgery has been performed. The marks of these skulls consist of scraping, incisions of holes, and cut marks. Therefore, these representations tell the archeologists that there was an extreme pressure exerted by an exterior force. The lack of any defects of the cranial vault tells the archeologists that this is associated with any illness and the cut marks are a sign of surgical mistakes and injury derived from the effects of surgery. Incisions in the cow skulls show an anterior and posterior hole measuring 64.5 mm long and 46.5 mm wide on the outer table. At the inner table of the cow skull the incision holes become smaller with the length being 40 mm and the width being 30mm. This shows that the holes in the outer table were removed more significantly than the inner table.
Furthermore, the bones surfaces were not smooth, and the edges of the holes were sharp with the diplopic pores being extremely visible, and all these signs tell the archeologists that there had to be a greater pressure present when these incisions were made. The Mesolithic period is a very important period in surgical history because this was the first man processed surgery. These cow skulls were found on the site of Champ-Durand in France between the years of 3400-3000 BC.
Alternatively, the evidence of this surgical practice, by the Neolithic people, was practiced on domestic animals in order to perfect the technique before applying it to humans. The most ancient example of an early surgery is provided in the popular book Crania Americana published in 1839 by Samuel George Morton. Morton gives an example of a skull that is from South America which showed a hole that Morton did not recognize as a trepanation, but the incision was a straightforward instrument.
The Neolithic People practiced these surgeries on dead cow skulls, but that was not a reliable source because they were practicing on these dead cows to learn to do surgery on living humans. However, the dead cows do not have emotions like living humans. Unfortunately, a full complete skull would rarely be found in these archeological sites, since they were eaten and most of the skulls were probably broken to the extraction of the tongue and the brain.
Surgical practices have been alive for thousands of years, but due to modern technology we have been able to perfect the practice. Though the surgeries have been present thousands of years ago, they mostly resulted in infections or made certain conditions worse. We have come a long way since the practices of surgeries on cows and would likely continue to progress due to the advancements of technology.
