Surgeon

Surgeons performing operations

In

In some countries and jurisdictions, the title of 'surgeon' is restricted to maintain the integrity of the craft group in the medical profession. A specialist medically trained surgeon is to be distinguished from surgeons in podiatry, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. It is estimated that surgeons perform over 300 million surgical procedures globally each year.^[1][2]

History

The first person to document a surgery was the 6th century BC Indian physician-surgeon, Sushruta. He specialized in cosmetic plastic surgery and even documented an open rhinoplasty procedure.^[3] His magnum opus Suśruta-saṃhitā is one of the most important surviving ancient treatises on medicine and is considered a foundational text of both Ayurveda and surgery. The treatise addresses all aspects of general medicine, but the translator G. D. Singhal dubbed Sushruta "the father of surgical intervention" on account of the extraordinarily accurate and detailed accounts of surgery to be found in the work.^[4]

After the eventual decline of the Sushruta School of Medicine in India, surgery was largely ignored until the Islamic Golden Age surgeon Al-Zahrawi (936–1013) re-established surgery as an effective medical practice. He is considered the greatest medieval surgeon to have appeared from the Islamic World, and has also been described as the father of surgery.^[5] His greatest contribution to medicine is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices.^[6] He was the first physician to describe an ectopic pregnancy, and the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia.^[7]

His pioneering contributions to the field of surgical procedures and instruments had an enormous impact on surgery but it was not until the 18th century that surgery emerged as a distinct medical discipline in England.^[7]

In Europe, surgery was mostly associated with barber-surgeons who also used their hair-cutting tools to undertake surgical procedures, often at the battlefield and also for their employers.

Titles in the Commonwealth

In 1950, the

Some physicians who are

In the United States, the Department of Labor description of a surgeon is "a physician who treats diseases, injuries, and deformities by invasive, minimally-invasive, or non-invasive surgical methods, such as using instruments, appliances, or by manual manipulation".[11]

Around the world, the array of 'surgical' pathology that a surgeon manages does not always require surgical methods. For example, surgeons treat diverticulitis conservatively using antibiotics and bowel rest. In some cases of small bowel obstruction, particularly where a patient has had previous abdominal surgery, the surgeon treats the patient with fluid resuscitation, nasogastric decompression of the stomach, which gives rise to resolution of the intestinal obstruction in cases where adhesions are the aetiology of the obstruction. The same is true for other craft groups in surgery.

Pioneer surgeons

• Christiaan Barnard (cardiac surgery, first heart transplantation)
• open heart surgery
  in 1944)
• Nina Starr Braunwald (First female cardiac surgeon)
• Dorothy-Laviania Brown (First female African-American surgeon)
• Victor Chang Australian pioneer of heart transplantation
• Harvey Cushing (pioneer, and often considered the father of, modern neurosurgery)
• Eleanor Davies-Colley (surgeon and founder of the South London Hospital for Women and Children)
• Michael DeBakey (educator and innovator in the field of cardiac surgery)
• René Favaloro (first surgeon to perform bypass surgery)
• Svyatoslav Fyodorov (creator of radial keratotomy)
• Harold Gillies (pioneer of plastic surgery)
• Jesse Gray (First female chief of surgery at Hopkinz Hospital)
• William Stewart Halsted (initiated surgical residency training in U.S., pioneer in many fields)
• Michael R. Harrison (pioneer of fetal surgery)
• Sir Victor Horsley (neurosurgery)
• Dr. Jekyll
  .)
• Gavriil Ilizarov, inventor of the Ilizarov apparatus for lengthening limb bones and for the method of surgery named after him, the Ilizarov surgery
• Charles Kelman (Invented phacoemulsification, the technique of modern cataract surgery)
• Lars Leksell (neurosurgery, inventor of radiosurgery)
• open heart surgery
  ")
• Joseph Lister (discoverer of surgical sepsis, Listerine
  named in his honour)
• laparoscopic spine surgery.^[12]
• Ioannis Pallikaris (Greek surgeon. Performed the first LASIK procedure on a human eye.^[13] Developed Epi-LASIK.^[14])
• epidural anesthesia
  )
• Wilder Penfield (neurosurgery)
• Gholam A. Peyman (inventor of LASIK,^[15])
• field surgery
  )
• Jennie Simile Robertson (first female surgeon in Canada)
• Valery Shumakov (pioneer of artificial organs implantation)
• Maria Siemionow (pioneer of near-total face transplant surgery)
• Sushruta (the first to document an operation of open rhinoplasty^[3])
• Paul Tessier (French surgeon in Craniofacial surgery)
• Mary Edwards Walker (first female surgeon in the United States)
• microneurosurgery
  )
• al-Zahrawi, regarded as one of the greatest medieval surgeons and a father of surgery.^[16]

Organizations and fellowships

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Surgeons.

• ACFAS
• FACS
• FRACDS
• FRACS
• FRCS
• FRCS (Canada)
• FRCS (Edinburgh)
• FRCSI (Ireland)
• MRCS

References