PBS: UK PREMIERE Wednesday 8 & Thursday 9 May at 8.35pm

This two-episode documentary tells the interesting story of surgery, beginning from its rudimentary conception centuries ago, up to modern specialist procedures. In the fight against diseases and in the search for knowledge, physicians put their own health at risk. Who were these people? What are their stories? And how has the world changed since their discoveries?

From the misguided teaching of the humours by Hippocrates, to complex organ transplants and brain operations, surgery has been full of suffer- ing, errors, and medical dead ends.

This film explores interesting coincidences in surgery, including random encounters at the right time, contamination that became the key to breakthrough discoveries, and research that proved to be a dead end but years on enabled quantum leaps in medicine.