All Traditional Surgical Practices

Historical procedures that treat a patient by a discrete cutting, drilling, scraping or gas-pressure intervention performed on the body, rather than by a manual manipulation technique, a compounded remedy, water or an energy claim. This includes the earliest documented forms of cataract surgery (cataract couching, couching), skull-opening procedures used since prehistory (trepanation, trepanning), a folk and medical cutting operation on the uvula (uvulotomy), the historical use of anesthetic preparations to enable surgery (narcotherapy), a wound-debridement technique using live larvae (maggot therapy), and a gas-pressure intervention for a collapsed lung (pneumotherapy). A technique whose defining agent is a practitioner's hands or fingers alone, with no cutting, drilling or gas-pressure delivery, is grouped instead under manual and body-based practices.