Ancient surgery

In a harrowing article about the reconstruction of a young man’s face after an electrical burn in The New Yorker , the author says in passing: “Reconstructive surgery is an ancient art, dating back at least to the time of the Upanishads, in India. In about 600 B.C., Sushruta, a scholar from Varanasi, catalogued more than three hundred surgical procedures, among them what may be the first documented rhinoplasty, which involved using the leaf of a creeper as a measuring device. ‘A patch of living flesh equal in dimension to the preceding leaf should be sliced off from the region of the cheek and, after scarifying it with a knife, swiftly adhered to the severed nose,’ Sushruta advised. A pedicle—a bridge of skin keeping the patch linked to the cheek—provided blood to the graft while it integrated with the nose, and was later removed. An ear, he noted, could be repaired the same way.”

Sushruta’s treatise made its way into the West in the sixteenth century, and helped birth modern Western medical practice.