In America, tens of millions of major surgical procedures are performed annually, yet few of us consider the magnitude of these figures because we have such inherent confidence in surgeons. And, despite passionate debates about health care, most of us have no idea how the first surgeons came to be. Now, Empire of the Scalpel elegantly reveals surgery's evolution from its roots in ancient Egypt to its rise to scientific dominance in the United States. From the sixteenth-century saga of Andreas Vesalius and his crusade to accurately describe human anatomy while appeasing the clergy who clamored for his burning at the stake, to the story of late-nineteenth-century surgeons' apathy to Joseph Lister's innovation of antisepsis and how this indifference led to thousands of unnecessary surgical deaths, Empire of the Scalpel is both a global history and a uniquely American tale. Readers will learn how the United States achieved surgical leadership in the twentieth century, heralded by Harvard's Joseph Murray and his Nobel Prize-winning, seemingly impossible feat of transplanting a kidney, which ushered in a new era of transplants that continues to make procedures once thought insurmountable into achievable successes. Today, the list of possible operations is almost infinite-from hip replacement to heart transplants to rhinoplasty-and Rutkow draws on his five-decade career to show us how we got here.