Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery

"This documentary series by Michael Mosley takes a closer look at the brutal, bloody and precarious history of surgery. This five-part series maps out the history of surgery through its catastrophes and successes.

1. Into the Brain. This part reveals how the art and science of brain surgery making it a life-saving discipline today, has evolved over the last 100 years through mishaps and misadventures involving crowbars through the skull to notorious lobotomies with ice-picks.

2. Bleeding Hearts. This part shows Michael Mosley taking a personal interest, having a family history in this area and taking a go at heart surgery of a man with no heartbeat and witnesses an operation where the patient is cooled until their brain stops and has all of their blood sucked out.

3. Spare Parts. This part unravels how the scientists in the early days struggled with transplant surgeries given they had no way of bypassing the human immune system which rejected the transplanted organ resulting in a lot of complications and even death at times.

4. Fixing Faces. This part unravels the fact that though believed by many to be a modern day phenomenon, plastic surgery is a science practiced since the last 400 years. Michael Mosley personally undergoes both 16th-century and 21st-century botox in his journey of discovery.

5. Bloody Beginnings. In the last part Michael Mosley finds out how the early days of surgery were murky and cruel, when the surgeon’s knife was more likely to kill than save."

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