Surgeon

In medicine, a surgeon is a doctor who performs operations. Surgeons may be physicians, podiatrists, dentists, or veterinarians.

The first person to document a surgery was the 6th Century BC Indian physician-surgeon, Sushrutha. He specialised in cosmetic plastic surgery and had documented even an operation of open rhinoplasty His magnum opus Suśruta-saṃhitā is one of the most important surviving ancient treatises on medicine and is considered a foundational text of Ayurveda and surgery. The treatise addresses all aspects of general medicine, but the translator G. D. Singhal dubbed Suśruta "the father of surgical intervention" on account of the extraordinarily accurate and detailed accounts of surgery to be found in the work.

After the eventual decline of Sushruta School of Medicine in India, surgery had been largely ignored until the Islamic Golden Age surgeon Al-Zahrawi (936-1013), reestablished surgery as an effective medical practice. He is considered the greatest medieval surgeon to have appeared from the Islamic World, and has been described as the father of surgery. His greatest contribution to medicine is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices. He was the first physician to describe an ectopic pregnancy, and the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia.

His pioneering contributions to the field of surgical procedures and instruments had an enormous impact on surgery but it was not until the nineteenth century that surgery as a distinct medical discipline emerged in Europe and the Western world..

In Europe, surgery was mostly associated with barber-surgeons who also used their hair-cutting tools to undertake surgical procedures, often at the battlefield and also for their royal paymasters. With advances in medicine and physiology, the professions of barbers and surgeons diverged; by the 19th century barber-surgeons had virtually disappeared, and surgeons were almost invariably qualified doctors who had specialized in surgery. Surgeon continued, however, to be used as the title for military medical officers until the end of the 19th century, and the title of Surgeon General continues to exist for both senior military medical officers and senior government public health officers.

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