Professor Harold Ellis CBE FRCS qualified in Medicine at Oxford in 1948. He was appointed Professor of Surgery at Westminster Medical School, London, in 1962, retiring in 1989. Since then he has taught anatomy. His particular interests were abdominal and breast surgery. He was consultant surgeon to the army and was appointed CBE in 1987.Sala Abdalla BSc MBBS MRCS is a senior Specialist Registrar in General Surgery and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.She graduated from Imperial College, London, in 2008, with a Bachelor’s degree in Physiological Sciences and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. Sala worked as anatomy demonstrator at King’s College, London, in 2010, under the mentorship of Professor Harold Ellis. She is currently completing her higher surgical training in South East London. With a special interest in education, she has been faculty member at the Guy’s & St Thomas’ MRCS anatomy teaching course, anatomy tutor at Imperial College, London and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and has directed clinical teaching programs. She is passionate about global surgery and health provision and in 2017 embarked on her first mission to West Africa on ‘Operation Hernia’. She is first author on a number of peer-reviewed papers and has presented work in national and international forums. This is her first textbook contribution.

"This is a book that should be on the shelves of students, academics, and historians of medicine as a single-volume encyclopedia for easy, handy consultation. The division into chapters will make consultation straightforward and the index will help in searching for topics that might not be apparent from chapter titles and their subdivisions."Alain Touwaide, PhD (The Huntington)

• Surgery in prehistoric times. The early years of written history - Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India. Surgery in Ancient Greece and Rome. The Dark Ages and the Renaissance. The Age of the Surgeon-Anatomist: Part One - From the mid 16th century to the end of the 17th century. The Age of the Surgeon-Anatomist: Part Two - From the beginning of the 18th century to the mid 19th century. The advent of anaesthesia and antisepsis. The birth of modern surgery: From Lister to the 20th century. The surgery of warfare. Orthopaedics surgery. Breast tumours. Cutting for the stone. Thyroid and parathyroid. Thoracic and vascular surgery. Organ transplantation. Envoi - today and tomorrow.