The Century of the Surgeon

This is a new, annotated electronic edition of a bestselling book on the beginnings and breakthroughs of surgery. The original has fallen into Public Domain.


"The Century of the Surgeon" brutally demonstrates the fact that the early 19th century surgery was essentially groping in the dark. The tools available to the young and ambitious narrating surgeon are saw, butcher's knife and iron forceps. The author describes early experiments with gas anesthetics; one of the early surgeons who utilized laughing gas could not withstand the mockery coming from his colleagues and eventually committed suicide. Many examples of stubbornness and inertia of the medical establishment regarding crucial and world-shaking discoveries (anesthesia, rise of microbiology, antisepsis, asepsis, appendix removal...) are described in detail. 

The story concludes with a description of first cardiorraphy, that is, suture of the heart, performed by Dr. Ludwig Rehn. A young man was brought in with a stab wound to the heart; Rehn manages to suture up the beating heart despite the opinion among renowned doctors that "who ever attempts to stitch up a wound in the heart may be certain that he will lose all his colleagues’ respect forever."