Has medical history importance for surgeons?

Surgeons will do well to remember that the two most important contributions to the growth and extension of surgery came from two disciplines, not then regarded as the most innovative. Anesthesia came from dentistry, the work primarily of W.T.G. Morton of Boston; prophylactic surgical antisepsis originated with the obstetrician Semmelweis, who developed a scheme of prophylactic chemical antisepsis that still remains the core of surgical antisepsis. In the mid 1880's, largely as a result of the work of Chamberland and others of the Pasteur school, surgeons in France and Germany substituted thermal for chemical antisepsis, whenever applicable. Whereas Lister's influence was tremendous in fostering acceptance of antisepsis by surgeons, by the end of his professorial career he had begun his capitulation to prophylactic antisepsis, which was complete by 1896 to the very practices that Semmelweis had proved the value of almost five decades previously. These were 19th century innovations. The greatest boon to surgery's advance in this century has been control of cellulitic infections through chemotherapeutic agencies, the sulfonamides and antibiotics. The tremendous upsurge of interest in research at the end of World War II brought surgeons to a fuller realization of the significant part they could play in the advance of their discipline. Intimate alignment of surgeons with physiologists of the circulation begot intracardiac surgery, a significant innovation with consequences of tremendous import for greater medicine's advance. Today, surgeons attacking the problem of tissue transplantation are aligning themselves with biochemists, geneticists, immunologists, experimental pathologists, and pharmacologists in their broad approach to the phenomenon of allograft rejection. The great extension of vascular surgery since World War II has made jewelers of surgeons of small tubular structures. The technical phases of these demanding operative procedures have largely been overcome. Solution of the biologic rejection phenomenon is awaited eagerly by all investigators, a discovery that will greatly enhance predictable success of transfer of skin as well as of organs. When will surgery experience another great catalytic forward thrust like that achieved through anesthesia, prophylactic antisepsis, and the antibiotics? No discipline in medicine can exist alone without privation. For its continuing advancement, surgery is dependent upon close and intimate relationships with many other medical disciplines. Apart from the enlightenment provided by a searching examination of the origins of our surgical discipline, the earnest and persistent pursuer will discover a lively pleasure and satisfaction that accrues as a special dividend.