Without modern luxuries like anaesthetics, surgery in the past was a bloody, violent and largely unsuccessful affair.
The papyrus details 48 cases of wounds, injuries and fractures and, unlike other texts from the time, offered not just magical remedies, but surgical ones.
"The Greeks disassociated surgery from medicine … The surgical profession, working with one's hands, was not looked at kindly," he says. In the Middle Ages, a trend emerged in Europe that showed how societies valued the profession: The rise of the barber surgeon.As barbers possessed a number of sharp tools, they were called on to perform surgery, ranging from bloodletting to amputating limbs.They even formed an association called the United Company of Barber Surgeons, a precursor of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
So Vesalius began to perform cadaver dissections, mapped their insides and, in doing so, became known as the founder of modern human anatomy."If you're going to do and there's so much bleeding that you can't see the roadmap that anatomy has provided, you need to learn how to stop bleeding," Dr Rutkow says.