Frederick Millham (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 24G | 4 Credits (Fall 2024) | CANVAS SITE
Thursday, 6:00 PM–8:00 PM
Was Surgery practiced in the Stone Age? Twenty six hundred years ago at the dawn of recorded history, Egyptian surgeons operated on patients by the shores of the Nile. What diagnoses were they making? What treatments did they offer? How did they understand human anatomy and physiology?A millennium later, the Hippocratic physicians emerged on the Aegean Island of Cos. These physicians left us carefully stated surgical principles based, at least partly, on observation and measurement.Why did they record their wisdom in the form of aphorisms? At around the same time, Shushruta, in what is now India, appears to have offered surprisingly modern surgical care to his patients. Who was he? In the second century CE Galen of Pergamum bursts on to the scene, intending to restore Hippocratic orthodoxy. Why was surgical thinking for nearly two millennia dominated by this his, often erroneous, teaching? The Islamic Golden Age, an explosion of scientific and medical discovery, is a key to our understanding of all that follows in surgical history. Why is this period overlooked today? How did the exposure of Galens anatomical imprecision by Vesalius in 1543 and his absurd physiology by Harvey in 1628 begin a Medical Enlightenment?Why did it take until the 19th century for surgeons solve the riddles of anesthesia and antisepsis?What were the roles of surgeons in the Eugenics movement and the Holocaust? Is the advice of the Hippocratic physicians that To understand surgery one must go to war true in the 21st Century?Our study will examine these questions and many more.We will visit the site of the first use of ether anesthesia and explore the human body in the anatomy lab at Harvard Medical School. We will admire rare first additions of the great works of surgical history at the Countway Medical Library. From time to time we will be joined by doctors with expertise in specific areas such as anesthesiology, combat surgery, and anatomy.
NOTE: The seminar will visit the site of the first use of ether anesthesia (the Ether Dome) and explore the human body in the anatomy lab at Harvard Medical School. We will admire rare first additions of the great works of surgical history at the Countway Medical Library. From time to time we will be joined by doctors with expertise in specific areas such as anesthesiology, combat surgery, and anatomy.