With our modern hospitals and with surgeons who are able to perform almost any kind of operation on the body, we might imagine that surgery is a product of modern times. Actually, surgery has been carried on since very ancient times.

Ancient peoples all over the world used flints as surgical instruments. One of the most difficult and dangerous operations of all, opening the skull, was performed in ancient times with flints! And this goes back to prehistoric times.

Flints were also used to open abscesses and to let blood. Other “instruments” for this purpose were the teeth of fish and even sharp thorns. Cataracts were removed from the eye with thorns.

As early learning in the use of tools increased, saws for use in amputation were made from flints and from bones. These things are known to be true because many mummies that have been found show the results of such operations.

When people learned how to make tools of bronze and of iron, scissors, iron needles, and other more complicated instruments came into use. With these better instruments men tried more difficult operations. There are records that prove that most of the operations done today, including major ones, were done in ancient times.

Among the relics of Pompeii are some very complicated surgical instruments. Operations were performed for thousands of years without the anesthesia that would make the patient unconscious of pain. There also was no knowledge of how to prevent infection. Operations were done long before anything was known about the causes of disease. Yet they must have been successful on the whole, or they would never have been continued.

The two things which made modern surgery possible were the discovery of anesthesia and of the cause and prevention of infection.