Primitive surgery. Skills before science

SPENCER L. ROGERS, Primitive surgery. Skills before science. Springfield, Illinois, Charles C Thomas, 1985, 8vo, pp.x, 128, $19-75. The author, an anthropologist, reviews surgical practice from neolithic times, through the classical period to recent aboriginal peoples. Surgical practice in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and India is briefly described. Special attention is paid to North and South America, with a detailed account of trephining in Peru. He takes "surgery" to include a wide variety ofprocedures, and he uses material from relatively recent anthropological literature to describe these procedures as carried out by peoples in underdeveloped areas. Operations may always have been carried out to restore health, but there were also many techniques with little relevance to the health of the individual, and concerned more with ritual, judicial punishment or cosmesis. Many of the "prescientific" surgical methods have continued into modern times in aboriginals, mainly as "decorative or symbolic body mutilation, demon-expelling devices or punishment for the transgression of tribal mores". From this Rogers surmises, in a field where there is often little evidence, that these were the techniques used in the earliest times, and that "neolithic man as a patient probably approached the treatment ofhis illnesses in somewhat the same way that we do today". The medical information is given in a rather nalive way, and Rogers notes, without comment, a report that bone grafts between animals and men are usually successful. The interest of this monograph lies in its review of the anthropological literature, for which a large bibliography is given. T. J. S. Patterson Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford