What are some surgical procedures that are no longer practiced because of ethical and/or medical reasons?

by AshleysaVelociraptor
feynmanwithtwosticks

Electroconvulsive Therapy is still used and is enormously beneficial to people with severe depression and numerous other disorders.

Do yourself a favor and change that to Insulin Shock Therapy

philish123212

Child genital mutilation. But it could be debated that it is still practiced to an extent.

Hypno-phile

I think if you're looking for ethics-based changes to how people are treated you'd obviously consider surgical sterilization (done widely to this day, but not just because you're mentally ill or developmentally disabled) and lobotomy for behavioural modification. But you should also look at the progress made in identifying futile treatments. "The Emperor of all Maladies: a biography of cancer" by Siddartha Mukherjee is a fantastic history of cancer treatment. There was a time when aggressive, mutilating surgery for recurrent cancers was widely recommended, but we've become much better at identifying when such procedures are futile. We're also better at identifying when a less-radical procedure can provide the same benefits (ie lumpectomy instead or radical mastectomy for a small breast tumour.

If you're just looking for alarming outdated procedures, I can't remember when I last tried a tobacco smoke enema to treat drowning!

XaminedLife

So, here's a pretty unhelpful comment that is pretty much the opposite of what you're looking for! Bloodletting is alive and well, sort of. In healthy people, red blood cells are created, travel around in the blood for awhile, then die naturally. When they die, the iron they were carrying builds up in your blood. Your liver then removes that free iron.
Hemochromatosis is a disorder where the liver is no longer able to remove all of the that extra iron, and it runs in my family. Yeah!! If you become symptomatic, it means that you have dangerously high levels of iron in your blood. If you did nothing, eventually you would die of iron overload. The only treatment for this disease? You guessed it! Bloodletting. Admittedly, they don't open up your vein and let you drip into a pot anymore. They usually have you just go to the Red Cross and donate blood periodically. The point is, this is a real disease, it is 2014, and the only known treatment is bloodletting.

caffarelli

Sorry, this is a throughout history/trivia-seeking question, which are against the rules here. Since a lot of your stuff is touching on modern practices, you might try /r/AskAnthropology though.