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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

Romans perfected plastic surgery because of gladiators. (Owners take care of their slaves, which are valuable.) They even used obsidian blades, which reduces scarring. That skill was lost for almost 2,000 years.

So it's not a big leap that medical staff at that time were experimenting with sutures.

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‘That skill was lost for almost 2,000 years.’

Only in the territories of the former Roman empire. Usage of obsidian blades has been recorded elsewhere in the world in the intervening time.

I would imagine they meant the skill of plastic surgery, though I'm not sure either way if that's true either. I suspect not, depending on the definition.

I always vaguely assumed "plastic surgery" had some relation to plastic the material, but it doesn't. It refers to shaping/remodelling of living tissue and the medical use of the term predates the invention of the material [1].

So I could well imagine ancients doing things that would count as "plastic surgery". I rather doubt they "perfected" it, though...

[1] Wikipedia says so, must be true :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_surgery

I mean various cultures have performed various kinds of cosmetic surgical procedures for centuries; the Romans weren’t even the first to do so

After battle in most countries in the past, you either lived or died as one cohort.

However, the Romans had enough patients over a continuing period of time to perfect plastic surgery.

So I think you're confusing emergency surgery and piercings with the art of plastic surgery.

If you think anatomical knowledge was universal, that's not true either. Japanese doctors were ashamed when they saw the first anatomy book - they had known nothing beforehand.

The US had to dig up bodies from graves at night for decades to draw those books.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23788147/

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