We have come a long way from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians, and here surgeon David Schneider explains the dramatic progress of medical interventions and surgery, and highlights the discipline's pivotal figures. This history links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease, how organs become cancerous, and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people's lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest health breakthroughs of the last century, including the evolution of medical education, the transformation of the hospital from a place of dying to a habitation of healing, the development of antibiotics, and the rise of transistors and polymer science.