Steam sterilisation works on roughly ninety percent of what passes through a hospital CSSD. The other ten percent is the problem — and it is the expensive ten percent. Flexible endoscopes. Camera heads. Powered handpieces with sealed bearings. Battery housings. Polymer-bodied laparoscopic instruments. Anything with an electronic component, an adhesive bond, or a plastic that […]

Enrique Finochietto designed his rib spreader in Buenos Aires in the 1930s, and the geometry has barely changed since. That is unusual. Most instruments from that era have been redesigned three times over. The Finochietto survived because the problem it solves — holding two ribs apart against the elastic recoil of the chest wall, for

A patient arrives with a completely occluded canal, a history of failed syringing at their general practice, and a tympanic membrane nobody has seen in six weeks. The whole examination and the whole treatment come out of a tray that holds perhaps eight items, most of them unchanged in design since the 1890s. Aural instruments