If you were to take a questionnaire on the street today and ask this one simple question: What is internal medicine and what is surgery? If you are not a medical professional, 90% of you may not be able to say clearly. In our daily work, we often meet some patients or family members who ask: Isn’t the appendix inside the stomach? Why do we need surgery for appendicitis? At this time, the surgeon usually laughs helplessly. This reminds one of a little joke: a person who received an arrow wound to the hospital, a doctor cut off the exposed arrow shaft and said, “Let’s go, I am a surgeon, let the rest of the internal medicine to solve it.” Oh, how can surgery be so superficial. In fact, it is not surprising that the general public can not figure out the medical and surgical, there are some objective reasons. One, the science is not in place. Although medicine is closely related to the public, after all, professionalism, the so-called “across the line like a mountain”, if there is no systematic study, it is difficult to understand the situation. Second, the name of internal medicine, surgery itself is not accurate. Nowadays, all general hospitals are western hospitals. Western medicine as an imported product, when transplanted to China, mixed with some Chinese medical terminology. In terms of historical origin, the earliest surgery could only deal with some external body diseases, such as some common boils, carbuncles, skin lumps, and some simple surgery, so it was called surgery in ancient China. Of course, there are legends in history that Hua Tuo used marijuana to anesthetize patients for craniotomy, but this is just a legend, and it is impossible from the perspective of modern medicine. First of all, the knowledge of anatomy in that era was far from enough, and then there was the problem of aseptic operation and infection. In the West, the early development of surgery is the same, four or five hundred years ago in the West, surgery is not a specialized profession at all, but the barber to proxy, but also can only deal with some simple skin surface problems. Of course later, with the development of Western anatomy, anesthesiology, chemistry and microbiology, surgery gradually developed and matured in Western medicine. In fact, the English word for surgery: SURGERY, means “hand technique”, and “outside” has nothing to do with it. It means that one of the important features of surgery is hands-on. Any disease that requires surgery is classified as surgery, and any disease that does not require surgery is classified as internal medicine. Of course, modern medicine has developed to today, the boundary between internal medicine and surgery has become increasingly blurred, in which there are many crossover. This is how it is currently divided, but of course there are many diseases that require different departmental consultation at different times, for example, coronary heart disease, some people can take medication to solve the problem, some people need to do interventional treatment, and some need surgery. So this requires inter-departmental collaboration, and mutual understanding and learning. An interventional treatment is mentioned here, which is actually a cross-discipline between medicine, surgery and radiology. At present, some medicine has a special interventional department, some are under a subgroup of radiology, some parts are under internal medicine, such as cardiac interventions under internal medicine, and some are under surgery, such as neurointerventional therapy. This division is not clearly defined, but has evolved according to the habits of different hospitals in different countries and regions. Now, do you understand what is internal medicine and what is surgery? It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand, there is a registration desk and an outpatient desk in the hospital where you can tell them your symptoms and they will tell you which department you should go to.