Surgery is the medical specialty that treats diseases or injuries by operative manual and instrumental treatment. Its practitioners are referred to as surgeons.
Among the first surgeons were battlefield doctors in the Napoleonic Wars who were primarily concerned with amputation. Naval surgeons were often barber-surgeons, who combined surgery with their main jobs as barbers.
In the UK and other places, male surgeons are distinguished from physicians by being referred to as Mister. This tradition has its origins in the 18th century, when surgeons were barber-surgeons and did not have a degree (or indeed any formal qualification), unlike physicians, who were doctors with a university medical degree. By the beginning of the 19th century, surgeons had obtained high status, and in 1800, the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) in London began to offer surgeons a formal status via RCS membership. The title Mister became a badge of honour, and today only surgeons who hold the Fellowship of one of the Royal Colleges of Surgery are entitled to call themselves Mister, Miss, Mrs or Ms.
According to 1996 data from the US National Center for Health Statistics, 40.3 million inpatient surgical procedures were performed in the United States in 1996, followed closely by 31.5 million outpatient surgeries.
