The history of surgery might be fairly niche outside of medical students and professionals, though many people may enjoy stories about the horrors of primordial butchering. This book, published by Routledge and coming at a hefty price, seems to be something like a simple encyclopedia for surgical history, not for the general audience.
The value I see in the history of surgery is that the ideas and culture of a society reflects in their surgical practice. The Greeks surgery was of quite good quality, but after the ancient period, the art of ligation of the artery was lost for a long time. In the medieval period, there was ongoing academic study of medicine that was surprisingly good, except for the taboo against human dissection, which impeded the study of anatomy, hence the importance of anatomists of the Renaissance when regions shook this restriction off. It’s fascinating how in the Enlightenment period, there is a strong culture of the sharing of information across Europe for the sake of medicine.
The first few chapters give a short history of primitive surgery across cultures which developed my appreciation for what they were able to do. The most interesting was trephination or trepanning, practiced across the world, which was surprisingly effective, and in some regions performed with unexpected precision. There was surprisingly advanced surgical knowledge in India during Europes late medieval period; my favourite part was the description of a procedure for curing cataracts, which I wouldn’t have expected possible in this time.
The first five chapters are fairly accessible for the layman, but afterwards, it will help to have a medical dictionary on hand. I used the Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary. The only chapter that was inaccessible to me despite this was the one on thoracic and vascular surgery; though parts of it were incredibly interesting, other parts were so dense with precise anatomical terms of the heart, that I couldn’t exactly understand some of it.
The final chapter, Envoi: Today and tomorrow, was an unfortunate note to end on. The first half (the ’today’) was alright, but the second half (the ’tomorrow’) was terrible. It feels written out of a dry obligation to talk about the tech trends of the time (VR, AR, 3D printing, AI), and either didn’t discuss current applications, gave poor examples if there were, or just speculated applications. Is a projector to show veins really the best example of AR? Perhaps I shouldn’t be rhetorical; considering how the largest AR thing was some phone game nobody remembers now, maybe this is the best AR can do for medicine! That aside, one statement bugged me. Though I know it’s a work on medical history, it’s still about history, and if the author is to comment on computing history then I expect the author to be accurate or to refrain. To say off-hand that Turing ‘introduced the idea of digital computing and computer programming’ fails to add anything, and is a very contentious statement. Turing may have contributed to theory of computation in some way, but computers were practical devices being constructed long before even his birth, and there were plenty of others who may have had greater influence in ‘introducing the idea’. You can safely ignore the final chapter completely; I did not consider it in my final rating.
Overall, I think the book was excellent; deeply informative and thought-provoking.