Introduction: What Is Special About the History of Surgery?

Abstract

This introductory chapter discusses what is special about the history of surgery, as compared to the history of medicine in general. It includes a definition of surgery from a historical point of view and a discussion of the extent to which surgical approaches are specific to the West and to the modern period. It looks at how historians have been dealing with the historical specificity of surgery, its origins and development, and how it is represented in the chapters of the handbook, drawing the threads of the different chapters together and situating their topics in the historiography of surgery more generally.