Surgical Techniques Removing Foreign Bodies: Ancient Rome vs. Present Day

Surgery techniques in the ancient Roman world have provided us with basic medical ideas that have since grown into the surgical practices that we have today. These Roman techniques have provided the foundations for most of the more recent surgical advances. One writer, a Roman nobleman named Cornelius Celsus, wrote a book, De Medicina (On Medicine), that explains his surgical techniques as well as his knowledge of Roman medicine at the time. In book VII of De Medicine, Celsus specifically describes how to removes missiles, which are more commonly known as foreign bodies, from the body. These writings have provided us the ability to get a first hand account of his medical practices at the time. Based on Ceylan’s findings published in his article Removal of metallic foreign bodies embedded in soft tissues by stereotaxic approach in the journal African Health Sciences (2014), focusing on the removal of foreign bodies using new techniques, it is seen that many of Celsus’s teachings have been altered. Using the writings of Celsus in De Medicina and the recent medical journal, we will compare the surgical techniques of removing foreign bodies between the Roman world and the modern world