Timeline of Surgery
Surgery from Neolithic trepanation and the Sushruta Samhita through anesthesia, antisepsis, blood transfusion and open-heart operations to laparoscopic and robotic surgery, about 5000 BCE to 2025.
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- Medicine & Health
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- medicine
- Events
- 31 events ~5000 BCE – 2025
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~5000 BCE: Neolithic people practice trepanation
Trepanation, cutting or scraping a hole in the skull of a living person, is among the oldest surgical procedures with archaeological evidence. A man buried at Ensisheim in Alsace, France, about 5100 – 4900 BCE had survived two such openings, both showing bone healing, and trepanned skulls have been found from Neolithic Europe to ancient China and Peru. A 31,000-year-old skeleton from Borneo, reported in 2022, whose lower leg had been amputated in childhood, is older evidence of surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning~1600 BCE: Edwin Smith Papyrus records an Egyptian trauma manual
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Egyptian scroll copied in the Second Intermediate Period, probably from an Old Kingdom original, describes 48 cases of wounds, fractures, dislocations and tumors from the head downward, each with examination, diagnosis, a verdict on whether to treat, and treatment such as stitches, splints and honey. Largely free of magic, it is the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma; it is named for the American collector who bought it in Luxor in 1862.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Smith_Papyrus~200 BCE – 500 CE: The "Sushruta Samhita" describes surgical training
The "Sushruta Samhita", a Sanskrit compendium of Ayurvedic medicine, described surgical training with incisions practiced on gourds and leather bags, removal of bladder stones and repair of a severed nose with a cheek-skin flap. Its dating remains debated: medical historian G. Jan Meulenbeld placed its development in layers from the last centuries BCE to about 500 CE, while older scholarship proposed origins around 600 BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushruta_Samhitaearly 1st century: Celsus describes Roman operations in "De Medicina"
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, a Roman encyclopedist who may not have practiced medicine himself, wrote "De Medicina", whose seventh and eighth books cover the operations of his day, including removing bladder stones, treating cataracts, extracting weapons, amputating limbs and setting fractures and dislocations. It also records the four cardinal signs of inflammation: redness, heat, swelling and pain. Rediscovered in the 15th century, it was printed in Florence in 1478.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Medicina~1000: Al-Zahrawi completes an illustrated treatise on surgery
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Albucasis), a physician in Córdoba in al-Andalus, made surgery the 30th and final treatise of his medical encyclopedia, the "Kitab al-Tasrif", with drawings of the instruments he used, among them scalpels, forceps and cauteries. Translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century, it was copied and cited by European surgeons for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Zahrawi1545: Paré publishes his treatment of gunshot wounds
Ambroise Paré, a French barber-surgeon, described how on campaign in Piedmont in 1537 he ran out of the boiling oil then poured into gunshot wounds, which were thought to be poisoned, and used a dressing of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine instead; by morning those patients were in less pain than the ones he had cauterized. In 1564 he described tying off arteries during amputation instead of searing them, reviving a method described by Galen and al-Zahrawi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroise_Par%C3%A91597: Tagliacozzi publishes a nose repair using arm skin
Gaspare Tagliacozzi, a professor at Bologna, described in "De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem" how to rebuild a lost nose with a flap of skin raised from the upper arm, which stayed attached to the arm, bound to the face, until it took. He refined the "Italian method" practiced by the Branca family of Sicily in the 15th century; it fell out of use in the 17th century and was revived in the 19th by Karl Ferdinand von Graefe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspare_Tagliacozzi1745: London surgeons split from the barbers
At the surgeons' request, an Act of Parliament divided London's Company of Barber-Surgeons, formed in 1540, and the surgeons founded their own Company of Surgeons; it became the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1800 and of England in 1843. In Paris, a Royal Academy of Surgery had been founded in 1731. Surgeons in Britain are still addressed as "Mr." or "Ms." rather than "Doctor" by a custom dating from when surgeons, unlike physicians, held no university medical degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_College_of_Surgeons_of_England1804: Hanaoka operates under general anesthesia in Japan
On October 13, the Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū removed a breast tumor from Kan Aiya, a 60-year-old woman, after giving her tsūsensan, an oral anesthetic of plants including datura and aconite that he had developed over about two decades, seeking to re-create a potion Chinese histories credit to the surgeon Hua Tuo. Trained in Chinese medicine and the Dutch surgery that reached Japan during its isolation, he went on to perform more than 150 breast cancer operations. Some historians regard the October operation as the first well-documented one under general anesthesia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanaoka_Seish%C5%AB1846: Morton demonstrates ether anesthesia in Boston
On October 16 at Massachusetts General Hospital, the dentist William T. G. Morton had Edward Gilbert Abbott inhale ether while the surgeon John Collins Warren operated on a tumor in his neck. Crawford Long in Georgia had used ether in an operation in 1842 but did not publish until 1849, and Horace Wells's demonstration of nitrous oxide at the same hospital in 1845 had failed. The news spread quickly, and in 1847 James Young Simpson in Edinburgh introduced chloroform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ether_Dome1867: Lister publishes his antiseptic method
Joseph Lister, a surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, reasoned from Louis Pasteur's work that wound infection came from living organisms and dressed open fractures with carbolic acid (phenol), first succeeding in August 1865 with James Greenlees, an 11-year-old whose leg had been run over by a cart. He reported his cases in The Lancet from March 1867 and set out his "antiseptic principle" to the British Medical Association in Dublin in August.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister1880s – 1890s: Surgeons move from antisepsis to asepsis
Rather than killing germs in the wound, surgeons increasingly kept them out. Ernst von Bergmann's clinic in Berlin sterilized instruments and dressings with heat and steam, methods his assistant Curt Schimmelbusch set out in a guide to aseptic wound treatment in 1892. In Baltimore, William Halsted had thin rubber gloves made around 1890 to protect the hands of his scrub nurse, Caroline Hampton, and in the 1890s Jan Mikulicz-Radecki in Breslau was among the first surgeons to wear a face mask.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asepsis1881: Billroth removes part of a cancerous stomach
On January 29 in Vienna, Theodor Billroth removed the lower part of the stomach of Therese Heller, who had cancer, and joined the remainder to the duodenum; she survived the operation and died of the spreading cancer about four months later. Jules-Émile Péan in Paris in 1879 and Ludwik Rydygier in Chełmno in 1880 had attempted the resection, but their patients died soon afterward. The reconstruction is still called the Billroth I operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Billroth1884: Koller introduces cocaine as a local anesthetic
Karl Koller, a junior doctor in Vienna, found that cocaine drops numbed the eye, allowing eye operations on conscious patients; a colleague read his paper to the German Ophthalmological Society in Heidelberg on September 15 because Koller could not afford the journey. Within months William Halsted and Richard Hall in New York were injecting cocaine to block nerves, and in 1898 August Bier in Kiel gave the first planned spinal anesthetic. Safer synthetic drugs later replaced cocaine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koller_(ophthalmologist)1896: Rehn sutures a stab wound in the heart
In Frankfurt on September 9, Ludwig Rehn opened the chest of Wilhelm Justus, a 22-year-old gardener who had been stabbed two days earlier, and closed a 1.5 cm wound in his right ventricle with silk sutures; the patient survived. It is generally counted as the first successful operation on the heart itself. Axel Cappelen in Kristiania, now Oslo, had tied off a bleeding coronary artery in 1895, but his patient died of infection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Rehn1901: Landsteiner discovers the ABO blood groups
Karl Landsteiner in Vienna found that serum from some people clumped the red cells of others and sorted human blood into three groups, now called A, B and O; Alfred von Decastello and Adriano Sturli found the fourth, AB, in 1902. Transfusions between people, attempted since James Blundell in London in 1818, had often caused fatal reactions; testing donor and recipient for compatibility, which Reuben Ottenberg began in New York in 1907, made them far safer. Landsteiner received the 1930 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABO_blood_group_system1902: Carrel develops a technique for joining blood vessels
Alexis Carrel, a young surgeon in Lyon, published a method of suturing blood vessels end to end; his triangulation technique, with three stay stitches pulling the opening into a triangle, and his very fine needles limited damage to the vessel wall. Developed further with Charles Guthrie in Chicago and at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs earned him the 1912 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Carrel1914: Citrate lets donated blood be stored
Albert Hustin in Brussels and Luis Agote in Buenos Aires, working independently, transfused blood mixed with sodium citrate, which kept it from clotting, so it no longer had to pass directly from donor to patient; Richard Lewisohn in New York worked out a safe concentration in 1915. In 1917 Oswald Hope Robertson, a U.S. Army doctor on the Western Front, collected group O blood in citrate solution and stored it in bottles for use days or weeks later, an early form of blood bank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_bank1917: Gillies's facial injury hospital opens at Sidcup
Harold Gillies, a New Zealand-born ear, nose and throat surgeon in the British army, pressed for a hospital for soldiers with facial wounds, and the Queen's Hospital opened at Sidcup, near London; with its convalescent units it had over 1,000 beds and by 1921 had admitted more than 5,000 servicemen. There he developed the tubed pedicle, a strip of skin sewn into a tube that kept its blood supply while it was moved to the face, a technique Vladimir Filatov in Odessa introduced independently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Gillies1926: Cushing operates with Bovie's electrosurgical generator
At the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, the neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing began operating with a high-frequency generator built by the scientist William T. Bovie, which cut tissue and sealed bleeding vessels with electric current. Bleeding had been a major obstacle in brain surgery, and the device let Cushing reoperate on patients whose brain tumors had been judged inoperable. Electrosurgery has since become a routine part of surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Bovie1944: First blue baby operation performed at Johns Hopkins
On November 29 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Alfred Blalock joined the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery of Eileen Saxon, a 15-month-old girl turned blue by tetralogy of Fallot, to send more blood to her lungs; she lived several more months, and the next two patients recovered well. The cardiologist Helen Taussig had sought such an operation, and Blalock's laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas worked it out in some 200 dogs and coached him through it, a role long left unrecognized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blalock%E2%80%93Thomas%E2%80%93Taussig_shunt1953: Gibbon's heart-lung machine supports open-heart surgery
On May 6 at Jefferson Medical College Hospital in Philadelphia, John Gibbon closed a hole between the upper chambers of the heart of Cecelia Bavolek, 18, while his heart-lung machine, developed over two decades and latterly with IBM engineers, did the work of her heart and lungs for 26 minutes. It was the first successful operation of its kind; after two later patients died Gibbon declared a moratorium, and the Mayo Clinic refined his design into a machine used on hundreds of patients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Heysham_Gibbon1954: Murray transplants a kidney between identical twins
On December 23 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Joseph Murray's team transplanted a kidney from Ronald Herrick into his identical twin, Richard, who was dying of kidney disease; their genetic match avoided rejection, and Richard lived eight more years. It was the first lasting success in transplanting a human solid organ, and immunosuppressive drugs later allowed transplants between unrelated people. Murray shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Murray1962: Surgeons reattach a severed arm
In May at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a team led by Ronald Malt reattached the right arm of Everett Knowles, 12, severed near the shoulder when he fell while trying to ride a freight train; the arm regained function. In Shanghai in 1963, Chen Zhongwei's team replanted a worker's hand severed above the wrist and published promptly, and in 1965 Shigeo Komatsu and Susumu Tamai in Japan used microsurgery to replant a completely severed thumb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replantation1962: Charnley implants a polyethylene hip socket
At Wrightington Hospital in Lancashire, England, John Charnley implanted his first hip socket of high-molecular-weight polyethylene in November, after the Teflon sockets of his first operations wore away and inflamed the surrounding tissue. His low-friction arthroplasty paired it with a small stainless steel femoral head and fixed both parts with acrylic bone cement; it and designs derived from it were the most used hip replacements for more than two decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Charnley1967: Favaloro standardizes coronary bypass with a leg vein
At the Cleveland Clinic from May, the Argentine surgeon René Favaloro carried blood past blocked coronary arteries through grafts of the patient's saphenous vein, guided by the coronary angiograms pioneered there by F. Mason Sones. Vasilii Kolesov in Leningrad had joined the internal thoracic artery to a coronary artery in 1964, and Michael DeBakey's team in Houston had used a vein graft that year, but Favaloro's standardized technique was widely adopted, and coronary artery bypass grafting became a main treatment for coronary artery disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Favaloro1985: Mühe removes a gallbladder by laparoscopy
On September 12 in Böblingen, West Germany, Erich Mühe removed a gallbladder through small incisions with a laparoscope, building on the gynecologist Kurt Semm, who had taken out an appendix this way in 1980 despite hostility from surgeons. The German Surgical Society rejected Mühe's report in 1986, but after Philippe Mouret in Lyon did the operation with a video camera in 1987 it spread rapidly. Georg Kelling had looked into dogs' abdomens with a scope in 1901, and Hans Christian Jacobaeus into patients' in 1910.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecystectomy#Laparoscopic_technique2000: FDA clears the da Vinci surgical robot
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci system, in which a surgeon at a console with a three-dimensional view steers wristed instruments inserted through small incisions, for general laparoscopic surgery. It grew out of telesurgery research at SRI International funded partly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA. Robots had entered operating rooms in the 1980s, as when an industrial robot arm guided a needle for a brain biopsy in 1985.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System2001: Surgeons operate across the Atlantic by robot
On September 7, Jacques Marescaux and colleagues in New York removed the gallbladder of a 68-year-old woman in Strasbourg, France, by remotely controlling a ZEUS surgical robot over a high-speed fiber-optic link provided by France Telecom. Named the Lindbergh operation after the aviator, it showed that transmission delays could be kept low enough for transatlantic telesurgery and was reported in the journal Nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindbergh_operation2008: WHO introduces a surgical safety checklist
The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a 19-item checklist for operating teams to go through at three pauses: before anesthesia, before the first incision and at the end of the operation, confirming points such as the patient's identity and the planned procedure. In a study published in 2009, covering eight hospitals in eight cities from Toronto to Ifakara in Tanzania, deaths after noncardiac surgery fell from 1.5% to 0.8% and complications from 11.0% to 7.0% after it was introduced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Surgical_Safety_Checklist2022 – 2025: Robots perform surgical tasks autonomously on pigs
Johns Hopkins University researchers reported in January that their Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot had laparoscopically joined intestines in live pigs, following an operator-selected plan, with more consistent results than surgeons in comparison tests. In July 2025 the group's Surgical Robot Transformer–Hierarchy, trained on surgical videos, completed a multistep phase of gallbladder removal on eight specimens from dead pigs without human intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laparoscopy#Robotic_laparoscopic_surgery