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  • The American Scholar

    Wielders of the Knife

    Mar 01, 2022 3 minutes
    REVIEW BY PERRI KLASS

    EMPIRE OF THE SCALPEL: The History of Surgery

    BY IRA RUTKOW

    Scribner, 416 pp., $29.99

    “WAR HAS ALWAYS benefited surgeons,” writes Ira Rutkow in “Battlegrounds, with their vast numbers and wide variety of wounded, provide intensive opportunities for the education and training of men who practice surgery.” He’s referring to the career of 16th-century “barber surgeon” Ambroise Paré, so called because in the Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance, barbers, with their sharp instruments, routinely performed surgeries on wounded soldiers and on civilians. Rutkow credits him with figuring

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