Expert guides and buying advice for surgical instruments used in hospitals worldwide.
The thyroid lobe is mobilised, the middle thyroid vein is divided, and now the lobe has to be rotated medially so the recurrent laryngeal nerve can be traced up to Berry’s ligament. A Babcock slips off the capsule. A Allis tears it. What holds is a pronged traction clamp seated squarely in the gland substance […]
Lahey Thyroid Traction Forceps: Uses and Sizes Guide Read More »
Until the 1920s, surgical needles came with an eye, and the assistant threaded them at the table. The suture doubled back through the eye, so the tract the needle made was narrower than the suture pulled through it — every stitch tore its own hole slightly wider than necessary. The swaged needle, in which the
Surgical Suture Needle Types: Taper, Cutting and Reverse Cutting Read More »
A pair of 180 mm Metzenbaum scissors costs a fraction of what a hospital spends replacing them every eighteen months because nobody has a sharpening programme. Multiply that across the two hundred-odd cutting instruments circulating through a mid-sized CSSD and the arithmetic stops being trivial. Surgical instrument sharpening is the least glamorous line item in
Surgical Instrument Sharpening: Scissors & Rongeur Service Read More »
The small bowel is mobilised, the mesenteric window is made, and the segment to be resected is isolated. Before a single cut, the surgeon calls for two clamps proximal and two distal — one crushing pair on the specimen side, one non-crushing pair on the side that will be anastomosed. The non-crushing pair is almost
Doyen Bowel Clamp: Atraumatic Intestinal Occlusion Guide Read More »
Before 1915, a surgeon’s scalpel was a single piece of steel that was sharpened, resharpened, and eventually thrown away. Morgan Parker’s patent that year split it in two — a reusable handle and a disposable blade on a standardised fitting — and the numbering system that came with it is still what a scrub nurse
Scalpel Handles and Blade Sizes: No. 3, 4 & 7 Guide Read More »
Damage control surgery is governed by a clock, not by a checklist. Once a patient is hypothermic, acidotic and coagulopathic, every additional minute of operating buys less than it costs. The working target for the first operation is 60 to 90 minutes — stop the bleeding, stop the contamination, close temporarily, and get to intensive
Trauma Laparotomy Instrument Set: Damage Control Tools Read More »
