Surgery in Prehistoric Times

Surgery in Prehistoric Times
The word ‘surgery’ derives from the Greek cheiros, a hand and ergon, work. It applies therefore to the manual manipulations carried out by the surgical practitioner in effort to assuage the injuries and diseases of his or her fellows.

There seems no reason to doubt that since Homo sapiens appeared on this earth, probably some quarter of a million years ago, there were people with a particular attitude to carry out such treatments. After all, there is an innate instincts for self preservation among all mammals, let alone man, so that a dog will lick its wounds, limp on three limps if injured, hide in a hole if ill and even seek out purging or vomit making grasses and herbs if sick.

Palaeopathologists have, however discovered abundant evidence in excavations of ancient skeletons that fractures, bone diseases and rotten teeth tortured out oldest ancestors. Of course, animals were subject to all sports of diseases. Indeed, a bony tumor was obvious in the tail vertebrae of a dinosaur that lived millions of years ago in Wyoming. Other excavations also reveal that injuries were inflicted by man upon man and that broken bones were splinted and skull operated upon.

Injuries inflicted by falls, crushing, savage animals, and by man upon man, demand treatment; among primitive tribes in the aforementioned studies, open wounds were invariably covered by some sort of dressing. This might take form of leaves, parts of various plants, cobwebs, ashes, natural balsams or cow dung.

Indeed, even in a recent times, the use of dung as a dressing for the cut umbilical cord in West Africa village babies still took place and was responsible for many cases of ‘neonatal tetanus’ from the tetanus spores that are almost invariably present in faeces.

Among Masai of East Africa, wounds were stitched together by sticking acacia thorns along the two edges of a deep cut and then plaiting the thorns against each other with plant fiber. In both India and South Americans termites or beetle were employed to bite across the edges of the wound whose lips were held together by the surgeon.

The bodies of the insects were then twisted off, leaving the jaws to hold the laceration closed, remarkably like the metal skin clips employed in operating theaters today. Splints of bark or soft clay were used to immobilize fractured limps and such bark splints have been excavated from ancient Egyptian burial sites.

Apart form dealing with wounds and fractures, early surgeon carried out three types of operative procedure, namely cutting for the bladder stone, circumcision and trephination of the skull.
Surgery in Prehistoric Times