This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week.

Medical surgery is so common in the industrialized world today that pretty much all of us will

have an operation at some time in our lives to deal with an illness or injury. Our guest,

surgeon and medical historian Ira Rutko says surgeons have been practicing their craft on

patients for centuries. But for most of that time, procedures were excruciatingly painful,

and great numbers of patients died from the surgery itself. Rutko's new book chronicles the

history of surgery from ancient times, highlighting critical blunders and breakthroughs,

and noting how bad ideas could persist for decades or centuries, while game-changing discoveries

sometimes had a hard time gaining acceptance. Wars were great incubators of ideas he notes,

since military surgeons often had little choice but to improvise on wounded soldiers.

And sometimes operations on figures as prominent as King Louis IV and President James Garfield

could have a lasting impact or teach important lessons.

Ira Rutko is himself a surgeon who holds a doctorate in public health from Johns Hopkins University.

He's written several previous books on medical history to which brought him to the

Fresh Air studios. His latest book is Empire of the Scalpel, the history of surgery.

Well, Ira Rutko, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you for inviting me.

When we talk about surgery being old, this account dates back to prehistory.

Stone Age people who show evidence of a kind of brain surgery is this surreal?

Brain surgery as you and I would refer to it, yes. There have been many instances of skulls

that have been found, dating back to neolithic times, that have grooves in them where portions of

the skull have been removed. And it's evident if you look at these skulls that this was all done

by hand. Now obviously there are no eyewitnesses, there is no written correspondence relative to this,

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