The story of the stapler

With the progress of science and technology, medical instruments are constantly updated and developed. The application of stapler makes surgical operations safer and more convenient, improves the quality of life of patients, and brings many benefits to patients.

Medical science and technology development so far, compared with traditional invasive surgery, a mature of minimally invasive surgery technology became surgeons unremitting pursuit, and the emergence of cavity mirror stapling, make originally not possible to complete the surgery, and greatly expanded the scope of operation, reduce the operation time, improved the security of the operation.

Before the 20th century, all the suture work in surgery was done by hand. It was fine to ligate small wounds or small blood vessels, but when it came to the operation of internal organs such as esophagus, lung, gastrointestinal, liver, spleen and pancreas, doctors had to spend several hours or even ten hours on the suture.

It is often said that time is of the essence, especially on the operating table. Marathon operations not only test the physical strength and perseverance of doctors, but also put patients under increasing risk during long periods of anesthesia.

Therefore, it is urgent to find a way to cut and anastomosis organs quickly.

Until 1908, Hungarian doctor Humer Hultl finally got inspiration from the stapler and successfully invented a new hemostatic suture tool - stapler [1]. The Chinese name doesn't make much sense to you, but the Surgical Stapler name makes it look so much better.

Since I got the idea from a stapler, I think you can immediately guess how the stapler works. Remember how you bind paper, replace the paper with tissue in our body, and you can roughly reconstruct what the stapler looks like when it works.

Of course, if it were exactly like the stationery stapler, the stapler would not be a great invention. To better solve the problem of hemostasis during surgery, Dr. Hultl, the inventor of the stapler, had some great ideas:

He modified the nailing stock, so that the extrusion of the suture nail can be B shape, which can not only firmly tie the main blood vessels, but also ensure the blood supply and nutrition of the nail tissue and cut edge;

The multi-row suture nails designed by him adopted the staggered arrangement method. The track of the suture nails was like two parallel dashed lines, which locked the space between each other to ensure that all the blood vessels passed through the cutting were ligated, so as to avoid exudation at the anastomosis [2].

It is worth mentioning that these two points are still used in the design of staplers to this day.

The emergence of stapler has greatly improved the efficiency and success rate of some operations, and it has undergone constant upgrading: the original stapler can only be stitched, and then a blade is added to the stapler bin to achieve the function of cutting and sewing at the same time. Staplers used in different organ surgery have undergone different evolution in shape and function.