Potts and Pott
John Raffensperger Fort Meyer, Florida, United States Portrait of Percivall Pott by George Romney, unsigned, 1788. From the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London. Source Willis Potts and Percival Pott were both highly skilled surgeons, prolific authors, and contributed to the surgical care of children. Percival Pott (1714-1788) Percival Pott, at age […]
The surgery of pyloric stenosis in Chicago
John Raffensperger Fort Meyers, Florida, United States Arthur Dean Bevan, MD, FACS, 1861-1943. Circa 1915. From the Archives of the American College of Surgeons. Harald Hirschprung, a Danish pediatrician, in 1888 described the clinical course and pathology of two infants who died with congenital hypertrophic pyloric stenosis.1 Gastroenterostomy was adopted for the treatment of infants […]
Hippocrates, abortion, and cutting for stone
John Raffensperger Fort Meyers, Florida, United States Two methods of lithotomic position recommended by Sushruta. From Mukhopadhyaya G. The surgical instruments of the Hindus. (vol 2) Calcutta University Press 1914 pp 79 – 80 [public domain] Physicians who take The Oath of Hippocrates swear not to perform abortions or operate for bladder stones: Similarly, […]
The times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, founder of plastic surgery
Portrait of Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545-1599). 16th century. Collection Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna. Via Wikimedia. In his essay on Giovanni Battista Cortesi, recently reviewed in this Journal, Dr. Paolo Savoia refers to other surgeons who achieved prominence in sixteenth-century Italy. In medicine, as in the arts, progress had been abetted by an influx of Greek scholars […]
Amputations
Amputations were gruesome affairs before the advent of anesthesia. In the civilian population they would have been done mainly for ischemia, gangrene, and infections. In the image shown on the left, the man standing in the background wears a letter tau to indicate that he had suffered from St. Anthony’s fire, ergotism. He presumably has […]
Saints Damien and Comas removing a bullet from a man’s chest
The renowned third century saints Cosmas and Damien were also doctors, often shown in paintings replacing a gangrenous leg with a healthy one. Here the two saints are performing an operation to remove a bullet from a patient’s chest. Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian dressing a chest wound. Oil painting by Antoine de Favray, 1748. […]
Ambroise Paré shown amputating a leg on the battlefield
One of the many of Amboise Paré’s surgical innovations was to tie off the blood vessels severed during amputations rather than cauterize them to stop the bleeding. This approach yielded greatly improved results but was much more time consuming because as many as fifty ligatures may have been needed during one amputation. Ambroise Paré amputating […]
William Morton first demonstrates the use of ether anesthesia
In 1846 the dentist William T Morton first publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic at the Massachusetts General Hospital. At the end of the procedure, the surgeon famously said: “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.” Very soon anesthesia became universally used in surgery. The first use of ether in dental surgery, […]
Jean Mery, distinguished French surgeon
Jean Mery. Unknown artist. Collège de chirurgie, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé: CIPB1509. Jean Mery lived largely in the days of the Sun-King Louis XIV, when France was still rich and powerful and had not yet spent itself into bankruptcy. Born in central France in 1645, he followed in his father’s footsteps at eighteen and went […]
William Cheselden, father of modern British surgery
William Cheselden was the most eminent English surgeon of the first half of the eighteenth century.1,2 Born in Leicestershire in 1688 just two weeks before William of Orange landed in England, he learned Greek and Latin at school, then was apprenticed to a local barber-surgeon. At fifteen he went to London and was again apprenticed, […]