Evidence of Byzantine surgical repair

[guy]

Ancient warfare would produce horrendous traumatic injuries. Here is evidence of one individual from the Byzantine Empire who suffered a traumatic jaw injury that was repaired with a golden wire. He was able to return to duty, only to later meet his death (and decapitation), presumably at the hands of Ottoman enemies.

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“An analysis of the warrior's lower jaw revealed that it had been badly fractured in a previous incident, but that a talented physician had used a wire — likely gold crafted — to tie his jaw back together until it healed. 

"The jaw was shattered into two pieces," said study author Anagnostis Agelarakis, an anthropology professor in the Department of History at Adelphi University in New York. The discovery of the nearly 650-year-old healed jaw is an amazing find because it shows the accuracy with which "the medical professional was able to put the two major fragments of the jaw together."

What's more, the medical professional appears to have followed advice laid out by the fifth-century B.C. Greek physician Hippocrates, who wrote a treatise covering jaw injuries about 1,800 years before the warrior was wounded.”

 

 

 

https://www.livescience.com/byzantine-warrior-fractured-jaw

Edited February 2 by guy

[guy]

Another article on the find:

The buried warrior’s head was located next to the skeleton of a five-year-old child. No one knows if there was a kinship relationship between the two. Credit: Anagnostis Agelarakis

 

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“It must have been some kind of gold thread, a gold wire or something like that, as is recommended in the Hippocratic corpus that was compiled in the fifth century B.C.," Agelarakis [Professor of Anthropology at New York’s Adelphi University] says.

What may be even more surprising, he adds, is that the man’s jaw repair underwent a series of adjustments over time. Due to the constant movements involved in eating, talking and going about the other activities of life, he says, there must have been many different adjustments made by the skilled medical practitioner

 

 

 

 

https://greekreporter.com/2021/10/02/byzantine-warrior-gold-threaded-jaw-greece/

Edited February 11 by guy

[sonic]

There is also the account of Procopius where a man named Koutilas was struck in the middle of his head by a javelin but kept fighting, even with it still in his head, and a man named Arzes who was hit with an arrow in his eye socket (?) which went all the way through to the back of his neck who also continued fighting.  Koutilas died when they tried to remove the javelin, but a surgeon realized that a protrusion on the back of Arzes' neck was the head of the arrow and that it would be easier to cut open the neck and pull the arrow through than attempt to pull the arrow back out through the eye socket.  Arzes survived.