The Hippocratic Surgical Instrumentarium: A Study in Nomenclature.

Abstract

Precisely what surgical tools were available to Greek surgeons in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE? In the absence of material survivals we must depend mainly on descriptions of instruments and their use in the Hippocratic Corpus to answer this question. We can also speculate on why so few Hippocratic instruments come down to us in contrast to the relative abundance of survivals from the Roman Empire.