A short history of Theoretical Surgery

Abstract

The concept of Theoretical Surgery has to be understood in the context of the scientific spirit after post-war Germany. In a first phase (1945 -1960) a relatively successful reconstruction of surgical research was achieved, in the tradition of Billroth's dogma to base surgery on the solid knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Then came what W. Lorenz used to call the "laziness of the fat years": dramatic developments in many fields of basic sciences, particularly the social and formal sciences, were overlooked and were not made fruitful for surgical research. There was a lack of communication with other disciplines and consequently there were no attempts to integrate these disciplines into surgery and surgical research.

Do we need another discipline in medicine? Fromepidemiology and evidence‐based medicinetocognitive medicine and medical thinking

“…The term and domain of theoretical surgery and theoretical medicine remains an open field, still separate from their practice [60][61][62].…”