Classics of Orthopaedic Literature (Volume Two)

Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of surgery in the West was as more a craft than science. Modern surgery is based upon foundations that were firmly established from the end of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century ¿ the Age of Scientific Medicine. It was a product of nineteenth-century so-ciety, when scientific discoveries provided the rationale for the-ories and actions. Anatomy, bacteriology, chemistry, pathology, pharmacology, physics and physiology all influenced the shaping of the ¿new surgery¿. It is the author¿s hope to provide students and practitioners with little time or opportunity for consulting the original documents, the means of ascertaining the periods and places in which the leading surgeons of the past had done their work. The best historical literature on surgery is in the formal treatises, but it requires leisure, patience, and access to a large library to make historical studies really interesting.