The First Heart Surgery Was in Africa

Evidence shows Africans performed complex procedures like cranial and heart surgery millennia ago.

Alkebulanians,

It’s true African history time…

When people speak about medicine, they often start with Greece. Hippocrates, Galen, the so-called “fathers” of science. But long before Europe claimed that title, Africa was already cutting, stitching, healing and in ways so advanced that even modern doctors pause when they study the records.

In Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus, dated to around 1550 BC, is one of the oldest medical texts in the world. It isn’t myth or vague but instruction: diagnoses, treatments and surgical procedures.

Within its faded lines you find knowledge of the heart, blood vessels, and the movement of air through the body. What shocks me is not just that they understood circulation in principle, it’s that they acted on it.

We have evidence of cranial surgeries, trepanations, where sections of the skull were cut and healed, proof that patients survived. And then there are accounts from later sources describing procedures on the chest, near the heart, with astonishing precision for their time. Imagine the courage of opening a body when the margin for error was so thin. Imagine the trust required between patient and healer.

Egyptian physicians specialised.

Some for the eyes, some for the stomach, some for the head.

That level of focus doesn’t emerge unless you have generations of practice behind it. The Greeks themselves admitted they learned from Egypt.

Herodotus wrote of it, though Europe would later act as if this knowledge appeared out of nowhere. I think about that when people repeat the tired line that Africa was a place of drums and darkness before outsiders arrived.

No.

Africa was a place where doctors measured the pulse, tracked disease, and attempted surgeries millennia ago. A place where medicine wasn’t separate from spirit, but where both were acknowledged as part of life and health.

And it didn’t stop in Egypt.

Across the continent, traditions of healing developed — bone-setting in southern Africa, midwifery in West Africa and herbal sciences carried down through generations. Complete systems, evolving, adapting, passing knowledge from hand to hand.

The story of Africa’s first surgeries reminds me that innovation doesn’t only live in stone monuments or royal courts. It lives in the human body, in the attempt to heal, in the courage to cut where others feared. And it forces me to see Africa not as the surgeon of history, steady-handed, precise, ahead of its time.

Science ‘began’ on the banks of the Nile, in the hands of African doctors, already opening the mysteries of the body, centuries before the world gave us credit.

They don’t have to. That is our duty.