I decided to stick with Surgery For Dummies, even though it now seems slightly less cute and absurd. My point was to highlight that there is no great mystery to surgery. A lot of surgery is much simpler than you might have thought. For many lay people surgery may seem like the pinnacle of a veterinarian's (or medical doctor's) specialized skill and knowledge, but I'm here to tell you that I could easily teach any of you the basics of the majority of the surgeries we do, and that I could teach you that with lessons that would fit on an index card. A small index card.
Basically most surgery can be boiled down to one of two processes - either you are removing something, or you are repairing something. The latter can be far more complex, but it actually only accounts for less than 10% of surgeries in a general practice. Most of the time you are removing something and that is usually not terribly complex. You could be removing testicles (neuter), ovaries and uterus (spay), a lump, a foreign object, or a stone, to give the most common examples. Here are the steps:
(NB: We are assuming the patient is already appropriately anesthetized.)
1. Use a scalpel to cut a straight line in the best place to find the thing you want to remove. Avoid cutting through blood vessels, but if you have to, tie them off with suture so they don't bleed.
2. Find the thing you want to remove.
3. Identify the blood supply to this thing and tie it off.
4. Remove the thing.
5. Sew up the cut or cuts you made. Depending on how deep the cut was, you may need to sew a few separate layers.
That's it. If you cut-and-paste those five steps, they'll fit on an index card.
If you have to cut into an organ to find the thing, such as a foreign object in the stomach or a stone in the bladder, then step 3 will be slightly different:
3. Cut into the organ containing the thing in the same manner as Step 1.
And the sewing is really just that - sewing. The thread (suture) may be special and we usually tie the knots using instruments, but the knots themselves are often just square knots. It's not hard.
All that being said, there are however two very important additional factors to consider before you dive into this. Ok, three if you count the fact that you need a license. And you should count that.
The first factor is that in order to "find the thing" and "identify the blood supply", and all that stuff, you do need to know the anatomy. Surgery is basically applied anatomy. (And, by the way, medicine is basically applied physiology.) Anatomy may seem complicated, but it's really just a lot of memorization. It helps to have a good visual memory, but it's not essential. And honestly, to perform a spay for example, you don't need to know the anatomy of the brain or the elbow or the lungs - just the abdomen and even there you don't need to know the name and location of every blood vessel running into the liver, you mostly just need to know what's right around the ovaries and uterus. Also, as soon as you start doing it, remembering becomes easier and easier as anatomy is something concrete that you can hold in your hands and see (unlike, say, the names of Prime Ministers you might have been forced to memorize in history).
This leads me directly to the second aspect, which is that it takes practice to become good at this. Duh. But this applies to veterinarians too! Regardless of how thoroughly a vet student has memorized the anatomy and the five points on my index card (or whatever notes they have from their surgery lectures), it will take them a ridiculously long time to perform their first spay. And they will be terrified and they will have to ask questions and get help and they will not be confident. At least one hopes that they will not be confident, as they shouldn't be, not yet. One of my classmates even fainted during their first surgery. Whump - hit the floor. They went on to become a fine surgeon. Eventually. With practice.
So learn the anatomy, keep the index card handy and practice, practice, practice under the supervision of someone who can swoop in should things go sideways, or you pass out. (And get a veterinary license.) And then you too can be a surgeon.
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