title: [History of mechanical sutures in digestive system surgery].
abstract: The attempts to suture wounds with mechanical device are very old, and their history is lost in the night of times. But more recently--that means less than two century ago--already before the true initial beginning of the modern surgery, after the birth of anaesthesiology with the "ether day--16 october 1846" there have been many efforts to develop new methods to join the tissue of the gut avoiding the danger of peritoneal contamination. The primitive tools of these ancient stapler were founded on the principle to compress with mechanical devices the two sides of the tissue to join. Very early in the past century, well before the appearance of the antibiotics, in the heart of the old Europe were developed and perfectionated devices able to join the intestinal tissue with metallic stitches: the primitive staplers. But after the end of the second world war the development has become bursting, with the progress of the Sovietic Institute of experimental research on surgical tools of Moscow and then with the mighty initiatives of the industrial power in the USA. The more important progress in this field was founded on the standardization of tools designed to fix metallic stitches on the gut, but very recently there are new attempts to use the more old principle of compression-suture on new basis. The results of this development, essential for modern surgery, are the standardization of the surgical technique, the shortening of operative times, and an important support to the new mininvasive approach to digestive surgery.
authors.forename: Nicola
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Picardi
mesh_terms: D013505:Digestive System Surgical Procedures / Q000266:history* / Q000295:instrumentation; D005060:Europe; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049691:History, Medieval; D006801:Humans; D013525:Surgical Instruments / Q000266:history*; D013528:Surgical Staplers / Q000266:history*; D017792:Surgical Stapling / Q000266:history; D013536:Suture Techniques / Q000266:history*; D014481:United States