Expert guides and buying advice for surgical instruments used in hospitals worldwide.
Before there was steel there was wax. Surgeons treating urethral stricture in the eighteenth century passed tapered wax candles — bougies, from the Algerian town of Bugia that supplied the wax trade — into the urethra and left them to soften and stretch the narrowed segment. The name outlived the material. Today a bougie is […]
Urethral Sounds and Bougies: Clutton, Lister, Van Buren Read More »
The incision is made. The pretracheal fascia is split, the thyroid isthmus retracted, and a vertical opening cut between the second and third tracheal rings. Then the tube meets resistance and stops. The opening is there — it just will not stay open long enough to accept the cannula. That moment is what the Trousseau
Trousseau Tracheal Dilator: Emergency Airway Instrument Guide Read More »
Start with the numbers, because gauge selection decides more about specimen quality than technique does. Gauge Outer diameter Common lengths Typical patient 8G 4.19 mm 100 mm (4″) Large adult, obese posterior iliac crest, core needed for tumour staging 11G 3.05 mm 100 mm, 150 mm (4″, 6″) Standard adult — the default in most
Bone Marrow Biopsy Needles: Jamshidi Sizes and Technique Read More »
A 3 cm vermilion border laceration, a child under sedation, and a resident who has just grabbed a pair of toothed forceps to hold the flap. Watch the tissue afterwards: two crush marks either side of the repair, right where the scar will sit. That is the argument for skin hooks in one sentence. The
Skin Hooks in Surgery: Gillies, Joseph and Double-Prong Patterns Read More »
Latissimus dorsi behind. Pectoralis major in front. The horizontal level of the nipple below, the axilla above. That quadrilateral — conventionally called the safe triangle — is the whole reason a chest drain tray looks the way it does. The anatomy dictates the tray. Every choice among chest drain insertion instruments follows from it: access
Chest Drain Insertion Set: Thoracostomy Instrument Guide Read More »
The instrument is a trephine — a hollow cylinder with a circular cutting edge, the same principle used to bore holes in bone since antiquity, scaled down to a few millimetres and fitted to a pencil handle. Its whole clinical value comes from one property: it removes a full-thickness core, epidermis through dermis into subcutaneous
Biopsy Punches and Skin Punch Instruments: Sizes and Technique Read More »
