In the fourth episode in the saga stars Star Trek (The Voyage Home), Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel in the past, back to the year 1986. A hospital in San Francisco McCoy reveals horror from backwardness of surgical technology, watching a surgeon we begin to operate. Imagine what he would say if he went back to other 6000 years when it was practiced even perforation of the skull with a chisel. The operation was to remove a piece of skull to expose the gray matter and he can act. Few survived the ensuing hemorrhage, edema and infections that would arise, but those few are still a surprising result, given the brutality of the art, read well, the total absence of any type of anesthesia. Awesome!

Even operations that today are considered routine and painless once were real torture. An example? The removal of cataracts introduced in the eighth century BC by a doctor, a Shushruta. The operation was performed with the patient lying on the floor and the surgeon kneeling over him. The poor wretch was tied to prevent them from moving. Then the doctor shoves the knife in the eye and ran up and down, back and forth, until they heard a sound and a small trickle of water running down. Following that operation, the doctor bathed the patient’s eye with milk. Get the shivers just to think of these crude techniques! Yet they were the only ones in existence.

But the beauty, so to speak, is yet to come. I’m about to tell you how you tried to correct the fracture of the sacrum a thousand years ago.

In a medical textbook of the time, belonging to a Spanish surgeon, reads: “If the last bone of the coccyx is broken, enter the left hand thumb in the anus and with your right hand to try to fix whatever it can succeed. If you touch a piece of the fracture, remove it and plaster so that the wound heals.

Another punishment was the abortion that occurred when the pregnant woman was already in an advanced state, pressing it hard on the uterus with his hands, feet and sometimes with tools to press the rice, until the fetus did not die or do not induce ‘internal bleeding. Add to that horrifying stories circulating about bleeding, massive blood loss practice for curing many diseases, no longer seem so terrible modern surgery!

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