Surgery

HISTORY

Surgery was practiced in ancient Egypt including setting and splintering broken bones. As anesthesia was little known, the patient was sometimes rendered unconscious by means of a blow on the head.

A 3600-year-old ancient Egyptian papyrus is the oldest known surgical text and contains the earliest recorded use of the word “brain” and suggests using raw meat to stop bleeding.

Ancient Egypt produced the world's first prosthetic limb, a toe composed of leather, wood and thread dated between 950 and 710 B.C.

The first recorded successful operation to remove an appendix was on December 6, 1735, at St. George’s Hospital in London, when French surgeon Claudius Amyand took out a perforated appendix from an 11-year-old boy, Hanvil Andersen. The organ had apparently been perforated by a pin he had swallowed. The patient made a recovery and was discharged a month later. 

An operation in 1753, painted by Gaspare Traversi.

American physician Ephraim McDowell performed the world's first removal of an ovarian tumor on December 25, 1809.  The tumor McDowell removed weighed 22.5 pounds (10.2 kg). The whole procedure took 25 minutes and the patient, Mrs Crawford, made an uncomplicated recovery. She returned to her home in Green County, Kentucky, 25 days after the operation and lived another 32 years. 

John Adams' daughter, Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith, underwent a gruelling mastectomy on October 8, 1811 to treat breast cancer. The surgeon: Dr. John Warren, a prominent Boston physician, employed tools like a large fork with sharpened prongs, a wooden-handled razor, and a heated iron spatula for cauterization. No anaesthesia was available. Nabby endured the excruciating pain without any form of painkillers.

French surgeon René Leriche first started wearing blue scrubs during surgery in 1914 because he discovered it reduced eye strain for doctors working endless hours during World War I. "Ciel Blue" became standard once surgery was videotaped in the 1970s and white scrubs conflicted with the white lights.

In 1929, German doctor Werner Forssmann performed on himself the first human cardiac catheterization, which is the insertion of a catheter into a chamber or vessel of the heart. After ignoring his boss and tricking a nurse into helping him, he inserted a catheter into his right arm before calmly walking to the x-ray department. Forsmann was later awarded with the Nobel Prize.

The first human kidney transplant was performed by Dr. Richard Lawler in Illinois on June 17, 1950. The patient was Ruth Tucker, a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease.

Dr Richard H Lawler

James Brett Jnr. underwent successful hip surgery in Houston in 1960. He was 111 years old, the oldest surgical patient on record.

The first ulnar collateral ligament replacement surgery (Tommy John surgery) was performed by Dr. Frank Jobe on baseball player Tommy John on September 25 1974.
The operation, which replaced the ligament in the elbow of John's pitching arm with a tendon from his right forearm was a success. John returned to the Dodgers in 1976. His 10–10 record that year was considered "miraculous", and John went on to pitch until 1989. 

Britain's first heart and lung transplant operation was successfully carried out on Swedish journalist Lars Ljunberg at Harefield Hospital, North-West London on December 6, 1983. He did pass away 13 days later, but that was as a result of the pulmonary hypertension from which he had been suffering before surgery.

Mrs Davina Thompson created medical history on December 17, 1986 when she was given a new heart, lungs and liver. She underwent surgery for seven hours at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, UK, for seven hours by a team of 15 headed by chest surgeon Mr John Wallwork and Professor Sir Roy Calne. Mrs Thompson died at the age of 47 on 13 August 1998.

Two doctors, Angus Wallace and Tom Wong, saved a woman’s life on an airplane in 1995 by performing mid-air surgery on her with a coat hanger and silverware. They also used cognac to sterilize the equipment. The flight from Hong Kong-London couldn’t land for help, as the increase in air pressure could kill her. 

RECORDS

The longest surgery to date was a 96-hour marathon between February 4 to February 8, 1951 to remove a 300-lb ovarian cyst from Gertrude Levandowski of Burnips, Michigan at a Chicago hospital. Levandowski weighed 616 pounds before the surgery and had a girth of 9 feet. After the growth was removed, the 58-year-old weighed a more manageable 308 pounds.

James Brett Jnr. underwent successful hip surgery in Houston in 1960. He was 111 years old, the oldest surgical patient on record.

Kidneys are the most transplanted organ, with over 17,000 kidney transplants happening in the U.S. every year.

FUN SURGERY FACTS

A study in the 1990s found that patients are three times more likely to survive after surgery if they can draw strength from their religious beliefs than those who have no personal faith. The study included 232 patients who had a bypass or other heart surgery.

One in every 112,994 surgeries is performed on the wrong person or body part.

Surgeons repairing a ruptured Achilles tendon on a man

The game Operation has inspired a real-life buzzer for operating rooms that goes off if a surgeon touches a nerve with a probe.

 "The Great Impostor" Ferdinand Demara, masqueraded as Cyr, working as a trauma surgeon aboard HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War. After being forced to perform surgery on 16 people, he speed-read a textbook on general surgery and was able to successfully perform all the surgeries without anyone dying.

Actor Noah Wyle, after simulating the procedure for over a decade as Dr. John Carter in TV's ER, successfully inserted a working I.V. into a fallen crew member on set.

UK surgeon Simon Bramhall marked his initials with an argon beam on the livers of two of his patients on February 9 and August 21, 2013. A colleague saw “SB” on a liver during a follow-up surgery. The marks aren't believed to be harmful to the liver but Bramhall pleaded guilty to assault and he was struck off the medical register.

Operation theaters are called such because they literally were theaters, built in a gallery style for public observation. Operations used to be advertised in newspapers and it was not unknown for an operation to be cancelled because public demand was such that a larger theater had to be found.

In 2015, the waiting time for organ transplants in America decreased for the first time in 25 years — and it's been decreasing ever since. The reason, however, is the massive increase in drug overdose deaths.

More than 60% of hearts and lungs collected for transplants each year are thrown away because they can't be kept on ice for more than four hours.painkillers