Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/545

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displayed in the invention of a forceps (Fig. 22) strong enough to crush all but the hardest calculi and yet so cleverly planned that it is practicable, while the crushing end of the instrument is lying inside the bladder, to separate the blades sufficiently far apart to render possible the grasping of the stone between the jaws of the instrument without at the same moment injuriously crushing the soft parts in the narrow channel of the wound or opening.^[1]

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FIG. 22. PIERRE FRANCO'S FORCEPS FOR CRUSHING CALCULI IN THE URINARY BLADDER.

(From Edouard Nicaise's Pierre Franco, Paris, 1895.)

a, closed; b, open.

↑ After I had written the preceding description of Franco's new method of extracting a calculus from the urinary bladder, I learned, from Haeser's account of the surgical writings of Susrutas in the Ayur-Veda (Sanscrit), that already before the Christian era (the exact date is not known) the surgeons of East India had performed this very operation. This fact, however, could not possibly have been known to Franco, who—so far as modern surgeons are concerned—should continue to be looked upon as the real inventor of supra-*pubic cystotomy.—Author.

[1] After I had written the preceding description of Franco's new method of extracting a calculus from the urinary bladder, I learned, from Haeser's account of the surgical writings of Susrutas in the Ayur-Veda (Sanscrit), that already before the Christian era (the exact date is not known) the surgeons of East India had performed this very operation. This fact, however, could not possibly have been known to Franco, who—so far as modern surgeons are concerned—should continue to be looked upon as the real inventor of supra-*pubic cystotomy.—Author.

[1]