ABSTRACT
The twentieth century was a period of dramatic surgical innovations, during which surgeons increasingly performed ever greater interventionist reparative operations. Surgery as a therapy expanded from simply cutting out disease (such as taking out tumors) to repairing damaged internal structures (such as vascular repairs or grafts) to replacing body parts (such as organ and tissue transplantation). The growth in surgical scope and success was directly linked to the discipline's ability to manage pain, bleeding, and infection through such innovations as anesthesia, heparin, and penicillin. 2 In the post-World War II period, surgeons and engineers began to work more closely to explore the possibilities of technology in treating disease, specifically inventing devices that assisted organ functions or replaced body parts altogether. Surgical procedures such as hip replacements, pacemaker implants, and numerous prosthetic operations became routine. The era of rebuilding bodies—and “fixing” the ailing body—was underway, ranging from artificial limbs to internal organs. 3
