50 Fun Facts About Surgery

Which organ did Soviet doctor Leonid Rogozov cut out of his own body at an Antarctic base in 1961?

The appendix had to come out, and Rogozov was the only doctor on a base more than 1,600 km from the nearest Soviet station. A driver and a meteorologist passed him instruments and held a mirror.

Which animals' intestines usually supplied the catgut that long stitched wounds and strung violins?

Sheep and goats were the usual source, and catgut has never been documented as coming from a cat. The name may be a muddle of an old dialect word for a fiddle.

Which medieval tradesmen also pulled teeth and amputated limbs, sharing a London guild with surgeons from 1540?

Barbers already owned razors and had the dexterity, so they did the cutting at a time when physicians rarely operated. Their striped pole once advertised those extra services.

Which Renaissance artist gives his name to the robotic surgical system cleared for US use in 2000?

Leonardo da Vinci was chosen partly because his studies of anatomy led him to design a mechanical knight, an early robot. The surgeon sits at a console and steers the machine's arms from there.

In which country did Christiaan Barnard perform the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?

South Africa made world headlines when Barnard gave Louis Washkansky the heart of a young crash victim at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Washkansky lived for another 18 days.

Which operating room item did William Halsted have Goodyear make in 1889 for his scrub nurse?

Rubber gloves were made to spare scrub nurse Caroline Hampton, whose skin reacted badly to the antiseptics. She later married Halsted, and the idea turned out to make operations far cleaner too.

Which British monarch inhaled chloroform from Dr. John Snow during the birth of her eighth child?

Queen Victoria took the drug for the birth of Prince Leopold and asked for it again four years later for Princess Beatrice. Snow is better known for tracing a London cholera outbreak to a water pump.

Which creatures do surgeons still place on reattached fingers to drain pooled blood?

Leeches returned to hospitals in the 1970s with microsurgery, because they relieve blood pooling in reattached fingers and ears. US regulators classed them as a medical device in 2004.

Which fictional detective was modeled on Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell, who read patients at a glance?

Sherlock Holmes owes his methods to Bell, whom Arthur Conan Doyle served as an outpatient clerk in 1877. Doyle later wrote to tell his old teacher so.

Which color did operating room staff wear before hospitals switched to green to ease eye strain?

White was chosen to emphasize cleanliness, but under bright operating lights an all-white room tired the eyes. Green cut the glare and made splashes of blood less conspicuous.

Which vapor did dentist William Morton use in Boston in 1846 to show the public painless surgery?

Ether kept Edward Abbott still while surgeon John Collins Warren cut part of a tumor from his neck. The operating hall at Massachusetts General Hospital has been known as the Ether Dome ever since.

Which British surgeon, honored in a mouthwash's name, pioneered germ-killing carbolic acid in the 1860s?

Joseph Lister read Louis Pasteur's work on microbes and reasoned that germs were rotting his patients' wounds. Listerine was named after him in 1879.

Which organ did surgeon Joseph Murray transplant between identical twin brothers in Boston in 1954?

A kidney from Ronald Herrick saved his dying twin Richard in the first successful human organ transplant. Using identical twins sidestepped the immune rejection that many thought could never be beaten.

Which part of the body is drilled or scraped open in trepanation, one of the oldest known operations?

The skull was opened with hand tools of stone, obsidian or bronze. New bone growing around the hole in some Neolithic remains shows that the patient survived.

Which Roman statesman is popularly but probably wrongly said to have given his name to surgical childbirth?

Julius Caesar is an unlikely source, because the operation killed mothers in ancient Rome and his mother Aurelia lived for decades after his birth. The term may come instead from a Latin verb meaning to cut.

Which facial feature did the ancient Indian surgeon Sushruta describe rebuilding with a flap of cheek skin?

The nose repair in Sushruta's Sanskrit treatise is the first written record of a cheek-flap technique that surgeons still use. The same text describes amputations and eye operations.

Which ancient civilization produced the oldest known surgical text on injuries, covering 48 cases?

Egypt's Edwin Smith Papyrus, copied around 1600 BCE, handles wounds, fractures and dislocations with observation instead of magic. It may have been a manual for army medics.

Which French ruler's surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey, invented horse-drawn flying ambulances for the wounded?

Napoleon asked for Larrey as chief surgeon of his army in Italy after meeting him at Toulon. Larrey borrowed the idea from the fast carriages of the horse artillery.

Which British admiral lost most of his right arm to a ship's surgeon after a 1797 attack on Tenerife?

Horatio Nelson was hit by a musket ball as he stepped ashore, and surgeon Thomas Eshelby took the limb off aboard HMS Theseus. Within half an hour he was giving orders to his captains again.

Which organ can a living donor give a piece of, because what remains grows back to full size?

The liver is the only internal organ able to regenerate, and as little as a tenth of it can regrow to full size. That lets surgeons share one organ between a donor and a patient.

Which transparent part of the eye is reshaped with a laser in LASIK surgery to sharpen vision?

The cornea is first cut to make a thin flap, then an excimer laser reshapes the tissue underneath before the flap is laid back in place.

Which eye condition was treated for centuries by couching, pushing the lens aside with a needle?

Cataracts cloud the lens, so couching simply knocked it out of the line of sight. It is the earliest documented form of the operation, though it left the eye with no lens to focus through.

Which device did surgeon Åke Senning implant in Swedish patient Arne Larsson in 1958, a world first?

The pacemaker bought Larsson another 43 years, during which he went through 26 of the devices. He died in 2001 at the age of 86.

Which joint did English surgeon John Charnley learn to replace reliably at Wrightington Hospital in 1962?

The hip he designed paired a stainless steel ball with a plastic socket, both fixed in place with acrylic bone cement. His first sockets were made of Teflon and wore out within a year or two.

Which drug became the first local anesthetic when Karl Koller numbed eyes with it in Vienna in 1884?

Cocaine had been studied by Koller's hospital colleague Sigmund Freud, who knew it dulled pain but missed its power to numb tissue. Dentists soon took it up as well.

Which pitcher gives his name to the elbow ligament operation that Dodgers doctor Frank Jobe devised in 1974?

Tommy John was given a one in 100 chance of success, then won 164 games after the operation, more than the 124 he had won before it. He retired at 46.

Which US president had a mouth tumor removed in secret aboard a friend's yacht in 1893?

Grover Cleveland feared that news of his illness would deepen a financial panic. Surgeons worked through his mouth as the yacht Oneida sailed off Long Island, so that no scar would show.

Which US president died after doctors spent weeks probing his bullet wound with unsterilized fingers?

James Garfield survived the 1881 shooting for eleven weeks before infection killed him. Alexander Graham Bell even built a metal detector to hunt for the bullet.

Which brain operation earned Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz a Nobel Prize in 1949?

Lobotomy, which Moniz called leucotomy, cut nerve connections in the frontal lobe because he believed faulty wiring there caused mental illness. He was the first Portuguese Nobel laureate.

Which Hungarian doctor slashed deaths in a Vienna maternity ward in 1847 by making staff wash their hands?

Ignaz Semmelweis cut the death rate from 18% to under 2% with a chlorinated lime wash, though he could not explain why it worked. He died in an asylum in 1865.

Which metal fuses directly with living bone, making it a favorite for joint and dental implants?

Titanium was first seen fusing with bone in animal experiments in 1940. Swedish researcher Per-Ingvar Brånemark later named the effect osseointegration and fitted the first human patient in 1965.

From which part of the body do surgeons usually harvest the vein used in a heart bypass graft?

The leg holds the great saphenous vein, the longest vein in the body. One length of it can supply several grafts for a triple or quadruple bypass.

Which surgical instrument gives its name to the medical journal founded in London by Thomas Wakley in 1823?

A lancet is a small surgical knife, and Wakley, a surgeon himself, picked it as the title of his new weekly. An 1829 issue carried early observations on blood transfusion.

Which device, fitted with a screw by French surgeon Jean-Louis Petit in 1718, stops bleeding from a limb?

The tourniquet takes its name from the French verb for turning, because earlier versions were tightened by twisting a rod. Petit's screw did away with the twisting.

Which animal supplied the gene-edited heart transplanted into patient David Bennett in Maryland in 2022?

A pig heart kept Bennett alive for two months after doctors ruled him out for a human donor organ. A baboon heart had been tried in 1984 on the infant known as Baby Fae, who lived for three weeks.

Which Marvel superhero was an arrogant neurosurgeon until a car accident wrecked the nerves in his hands?

Doctor Strange turned to sorcery only after medicine failed to restore his hands. Artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee introduced him in 1963.

Which tool do players use to lift plastic ailments out of the patient in the Hasbro game Operation?

Tweezers are wired to the board, so brushing the metal edge of a cavity gives the mistake away. Inventor John Spinello sold his rights for $500 and the promise of a job that never came.

Which nickname is given to laparoscopic operations, done through tiny cuts with a camera on a thin tube?

Keyhole surgery was first tried on dogs by German surgeon Georg Kelling in 1901, and on human patients nine years later. The small cuts mean less pain, less bleeding and a shorter recovery than a long open incision.

What does the Greek-derived suffix -ectomy mean in operation names such as mastectomy and vasectomy?

Cutting out is the literal sense, because the ending joins the Greek words for "out" and "to cut". Any operation with this ending removes something from the body.

Which organ is cut down to a narrow banana-sized sleeve in a widely used weight-loss operation?

The stomach loses about 75 to 85 percent of its volume in a sleeve gastrectomy. The cut runs along the organ's outer curve, and the operation cannot be reversed.

Which speedy London surgeon performed Europe's first public operation under modern anesthesia in 1846?

Robert Liston could take off a limb in two and a half minutes, at a time when speed was essential to limit pain and improve the odds of survival. The Scottish-born surgeon died a year after the landmark operation.

Which French army surgeon found that a balm of egg yolk and rose oil healed wounds better than boiling oil?

Ambroise Paré compared the two treatments on wounded soldiers and found the men given boiling oil in agony. He went on to serve four kings of France.

Which city in Muslim Spain was home to al-Zahrawi, author of a thirty-volume medical encyclopedia?

Córdoba was where al-Zahrawi, known in Latin as Albucasis, spent most of his life around the year 1000. He pioneered the use of gut thread for stitches inside the body.

Which New Zealand-born surgeon rebuilt the faces of First World War soldiers at a hospital in Sidcup?

Harold Gillies persuaded the army to open a ward for facial injuries, and when it overflowed a whole hospital for the work was built at Sidcup. He is often called the father of plastic surgery.

Which Black surgeon repaired a stab wound to the sac around a patient's heart in Chicago in 1893?

Daniel Hale Williams operated on James Cornish, who had been stabbed in the chest, at Provident Hospital. He had founded the hospital two years earlier with an integrated staff.

Which American surgeon, called the father of modern neurosurgery, also won a Pulitzer Prize for a biography?

Harvey Cushing won the 1926 Pulitzer for his life of the physician William Osler. A hormone disorder he was the first to describe still carries his name.

Which South American arrow poison was introduced into operating rooms in 1942 as a muscle relaxant?

Curare paralyzes muscle, so anesthetists no longer needed heavy doses of other drugs just to keep a patient still. Hunters used it on blowgun darts, which killed prey by stopping its breathing.

Which anti-rejection drug, isolated from a soil fungus, came into use for organ transplants in 1983?

Cyclosporine came from fungi in soil samples that Sandoz employees collected in Norway and Wisconsin. It was isolated in 1971, twelve years before doctors could prescribe it.

Which British Army surgeon, who died in 1865, was revealed after death to have been named Margaret at birth?

James Barry rose to Inspector General in charge of military hospitals, the second-highest medical post in the army. He also performed an early surgical delivery in which both mother and baby survived.

Which Austrian scientist made transfusions far safer by distinguishing the main human blood groups in 1901?

Karl Landsteiner won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the work and later helped to identify the Rhesus factor as well. He was also one of the discoverers of the polio virus.