Workers were hardly surprised when they stumbled upon ancient ruins in the Italian town of Rimini in 1989. Now a popular tourist destination along the Adriatic coast, Rimini—or Ariminum in ancient times—had been a major Roman town for centuries, and the modern city is strewn with monuments from that period.

What the workers found that spring day, however, would lead archaeologists to something quite unique: a cache of surgical instruments that had lain undisturbed in a Roman surgeon’s clinic for centuries, offering tantalizing new details about the practice of medicine in the classical world.