The Romans, particularly the Roman army, had some of the best medical and surgical techniques and practices until the 18th century. A Roman surgery was a clean place. They used vinnegar and sometimes boiling water to sterilize their tools. There is no evidence supporting that the Romans had uncovered the science behind germs, however the Roman army proved an excellent training ground for many doctors who learned through experience that things needed to be kept clean. There is evidence that the great Roman scholar Varro had a theory on contagion. The Romans had a variety of sophisticated medical tools, including specialized scalpels, various types of retrators, foreceps, and touriquets, which was actually a very advanced piece of medical hardware. Many of the tools that I have just listed have been unearthed at Pompeii and a quick google search will give you images of the variety of tools that they had. During the high Roman empire, every Roman neighborhood had an emergency room staffed by a midwife and the equivalent of a male nurse, typically a veteran of the Roman army. One of the greatest Roman doctors was a Roman army veteran from the first century, known as Cornelius Celsus. Celsus left behind an excellent manual for a variety of Roman medical practices, including how to perform an amputation. This may seem like a very basic surgical technique, but this was actually a cutting edge (no pun intended) operation. To my knowledge there is no other culture in the ancient world that could do these successfully. The tourniquet described above was used to stop the bleeding and the skin would be cut at an angle down to the bone which would be sawn through and then the skin would be suchered together. The Romans used wine and opiates as anesthetics, however opiates can prove a very dangerous anesthetic when performing a surgery. Therefore, the pain would only be slightly numbed, the person would not be knocked unconscious. To my knowledge, there was no cross-over between being a barber and being a doctor in Roman times. That was an 18th century thing. For sources on the Roman medical practices, we of course have Cornelius Celsus, who provides the more practical side of medicine. You have likely heard of Galen, known as the doctor to the gladiators. The personal physician to several Roman emperors, Galen's work was brilliant for the day, and he had formal education on the subject from one of the ancient world's best univerities. He did, however, transition to medical theory which would be informed by various schools of philosophical thought. He was very much a public intellectual on medicine, performing public demonstrations of his medical practices. His work was used for a very long time, but much of it has never been translated out of Greek. Galen was probably the most influential of the sources in the subject. Soranus left behind an entire manual on Roman gynecology, which gives much insight into Roman women's medicine. Thence we get an excellent desciption of how ancient midwives were, surgical practices such as the caesarian section and so on. For secondary sources, I will leave citations.

Majno, Guido. The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Print. (This is by far the best book on the subject IMHO.)

Gabriel, Richard A., and Karen S. Metz. A History of Military Medicine. New York: Greenwood, 1992. Print.