Surgical Instruments

The instrument has not changed much since Manuel García pointed a dentist’s mirror at his own vocal folds in 1854 and became the first person to see a living larynx. A silvered glass disc, angled on a stem, held in a threaded handle. Fibre-optic scopes have taken over most of the workload in tertiary ENT, […]

Count the instruments on a laid-out neck dissection tray and you will get somewhere between 90 and 140 pieces. Count the ones the surgeon actually picks up during a selective dissection and the number drops to around 25. That gap is where most trays go wrong: they are assembled by adding, never by auditing, and

A tympanoplasty tray is deceptive. Laid out on the Mayo stand it looks sparse next to a laparotomy set, maybe thirty pieces, most of them thinner than a pencil lead. But every one of those pieces has to work in a space roughly 15 mm across, under a microscope at 10x to 25x magnification, next

Ask five rhinologists what they reach for during an inferior turbinate reduction and you will get five answers. Some work almost entirely with a microdebrider. Some still do a clean submucous resection with cold steel and get better long-term mucociliary function for it. What almost all of them agree on is that the cutting instrument

Antral lavage was, for most of the twentieth century, the standard answer to chronic maxillary sinusitis. Functional endoscopic sinus surgery displaced it in high-income systems from the 1990s onward, and a good many ENT trainees in Europe now qualify without ever having performed one. The instrument did not disappear. It moved. Antral puncture remains in

A paediatric grommet list is one of the shortest operations in ENT and one of the least forgiving. The surgeon is working down a canal 7 mm wide through a microscope, the patient is a three-year-old under a short general anaesthetic, and there are perhaps four minutes per ear. Every instrument that reaches the hand