Renaissance Surgeons

This book examines the lives, careers, and publications of a group of Spanish Renaissance surgeons as exemplars of both the surgical renaissance occurring across Europe and of the unique context of Spain. In the sixteenth century, European surgeons forged new identities as learned experts who combined university medical degrees with manual skills and practical experience. No longer merely apprentice-trained craftsmen engaged only with healing the exterior wounds and rashes of the body, these learned surgeons actively engaged with the epistemic shifts of the sixteenth century, including new forms of knowledge construction, based in empiricism, and knowledge circulation, based in printing. These surgeons have long been overshadowed by the innovative work of anatomists and botanists but were participants in the same intellectual currents reshaping many aspects of knowledge. Active in communities across both Castile and Aragon, learned surgeons formed an intellectual community of practitioners and scholars who helped reshape surgical knowledge and practice. This book provides an overview of the Spanish learned surgeons, known as médicos y cirujanos, who were influential in universities, on battlefields, at court, and in private practice. It argues that the surgeons’ larger significance rests in their collective identity as part of the broader intellectual shift to empiricism and innovation of the Renaissance. Renaissance Surgeons: Learning and Expertise in the Age of Print is essential reading for upper-level students and scholars of the history of medicine and early modern Spain.

Katharine Park has written a social, intellectual, and institutional history of medicine in Florence during the century after the Black Death of 1348. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book examines the relationship of medicine to those intellectual and social changes which historians call the Renaissance. The contributors describe how the whole range of medicine, from practical therapeutics to surgery, anatomy and pharmacy, was developing. Some important questions about the nature of medicine as it was taught and practised are raised. These include the continuing vigour of Arabic and scholastic medicine, how this was reconciled with the renaissance love of all things Greek and the nature of medicine in different parts of Europe. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their subjects and are based on contributions read at a meeting called for the purpose in Cambridge and supported by the Wellcome Trust.

In 1960, fresh out of a stint in the Air Force, Henry Buchwald was recruited by Dr. Owen H. Wangensteen to join the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota’s medical school. For an American born in Austria, a child of the Holocaust, a position in a city then considered by some to be the “anti-Semitic capital of the United States” might seem an uneasy fit, but in the culture of innovation created by Wangensteen, Buchwald, who had chafed against the rigidity of East Coast medical practice, found everything an imaginative young surgeon could have asked for. Surgical Renaissance in the Heartland is the story of a golden era in American surgery, ushered in by Wangensteen’s creative approach to medical practice, told by one who lived it. Buchwald describes the roots, heritage, and traditions of this remarkable period at the University of Minnesota’s medical school, where the foundations of open-heart procedures, heart and pancreas transplantation, bariatric surgery, implantable infusion pump therapies, and other medical landmarks originated. Buchwald’s account of the Wangensteen era brings to life a medical culture that thrived on debate and the expression of ideas, a clinical practice bound only by the limits of a surgeon’s inspiration and imagination. As entertaining as it is informative, Surgical Renaissance in the Heartland effectively conjures the character—and characters—of a time that forever changed medicine and the lives of millions.

This volume offers a comprehensive historical survey of medicine in sixteenth-century Europe and examines both medical theories and practices within their intellectual and social context. Nutton investigates the changes brought about in medicine by the opening-up of the European world to new drugs and new diseases, such as syphilis and the Sweat, and by the development of printing and more efficient means of communication. Chapters examine how civic institutions such as Health Boards, hospitals, town doctors and healers became more significant in the fight against epidemic disease, and special attention is given to the role of women and domestic medicine. The final section, on beliefs, explores the revised Galenism of academic medicine, including a new emphasis on anatomy and its most vocal antagonists, Paracelsians. The volume concludes by considering the effect of religious changes on medicine, including the marginalisation, and often expulsion, of non-Christian practitioners. Based on a wide reading of primary sources from literature and art across Europe, Renaissance Medicine is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the history of medicine and disease in the sixteenth century.

Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider’s The Invention of Surgery is an in-depth biography of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing developments of anesthesia and antiseptic operating rooms to the “implant revolution” of the twentieth century.The Invention of Surgery is history of surgery that explains this dramatic, world-changing progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people’s lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century. And as Schneider argues, surgery has not finished transforming; new technologies are constantly reinventing both the practice of surgery and the nature of the objects we are permanently implanting in our bodies. Schneider considers these latest developments, asking “What’s next?” and analyzing how our conception of surgery has changed alongside our evolving ideas of medicine, technology, and our bodies.

A history of key advances in surgery including primitive techniques. Includes a facsinating glimpse into the future of surgery.