The Scientific Nature of Surgery. History and Philosophy

Abstract

Can we talk about science when we speak about surgery? Not, accordingly to classical epistemology. To consider a discipline as scientific, it must meet certain requirements that surgery would not seem to satisfy: being part of a paradigm and creating scientific knowledge. Therefore, if we want to affirm the scientific nature of surgery, we must investigate the existence of exemplars that could be paradigmatic, since they are the ones that support its epistemic structure. Along with this, we must demonstrate that their practice creates scientific knowledge. We’ve postulated five objectives that surgery had to satisfy. We’ve seen in classic history, that the main characters which are considered founders of modern surgery –Ambrosio Pare and John Hunter– were only able to reach the first three, and as we’ll see, were not enough to consider surgery as part of science. Moving forward in history, we are able to find the first paradigmatic exemplars. The first corresponds to the research work in the animal phase, prior to the first successful human gastrectomy performed by the German surgeon Theodor Billroth, in 1882. The second corresponds to the research in thyroid’s physiology carried out by Emil T. Kocher; thanks to this, he won the Nobel Prize in medicine and phy- siology in 1909. An analysis of the epistemic development of surgery is made from them, and the consequences are analyzed using the concept of the epistemic cycle. Those key hypotheses are important to understand the creation of scientific knowledge in technical disciplines as surgery