“What a surgeon does to a patient — if it were done without consent — would be a felony.” surgeon and inventor Dr. Catherine Mohr tells TED in a fascinating podcast about the past, present and future of surgery. Learn about the brutalities of old-school surgery, performed without anesthesia and often without even clean hands, and familiarize yourself with surgery’s robotic future. This skull dates back 5,000-10,000 years, waaay before aseptic surgical techniques and certainly way before anesthetics. The crazy thing? Anthropologists have determined that from the healing seen on this trephinated skull that the “patient” actually survived this brutal and crude brain surgery. The surgical future includes amazing things like repairing the heart without cracking the ribcage.