Thyroid Surgery Throughout History

Abstract

Endocrine surgery is one of the youngest branches of general surgery, mainly due to the relatively late development of endocrinology as a separate domain of medical study. Even if modern procedures for endocrine pathologies be it malignant or benign, are nowadays more standardized, reproducible and fall into specific guidelines, the road to this point was not without its hardships. Certain notions regarding the role of the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands have emerged in medical texts from ancient times, but surgery was considered troublesome and not worth the benefit, if the patient survived the procedure. This slow and exhausting trajectory saw an astonishing evolution during the end of the 19 th century and positively bloomed in the beginning of the 20 th , with the significant contributions of outstanding pioneer surgeons in both Europe and the US. The predicament nowadays has shifted more from archaic issues such as postoperative morbidity and mortality in patients suffering from endocrine dysfunctions to whether minimally invasive surgery should become the gold standard, and if it should-would it be laparoscopic surgery or would the robot take the spotlight? The first literature mentions of goitre were reported in ancient China as early as 2700 BC, and even if the Chinese regarded such ailments as bygones and oddities, they did observe the positive effects of ingesting iodine-rich foods such as seaweed in treating these large neck masses (1). Many anatomists and great artists studied, described and illustrated the thyroid gland,