435 words
Many of us have had the experience, you’re in a hospital ward lying on a stiff hospital bed with cold linen sheets in the middle of winter, and the nurse pops up and mentions that it’s time to insert the trusty old catheter into your bod. They want to drain urine from you or inject fluids into you, one or the other or something else, it doesn’t really matter, it’s a very versatile implement. You break into the beginnings of a cold sweat because you know from experience that it’s not the drip of euphoria you’re about to receive and it’s going to be uncomfortable and sore afterwards. And to top it off, your sense of unease will be reinforced every time you glance at its ugly apparition over the next, god knows how many hours.
But if we peer back into history we can take some solace from the fact that we’re no longer using the early, distinctly medically-suspect versions of the catheter. First the word! “Catheter” comes from the Ancient Greek καθετήρ kathetḗr, from the verb καθίεμαι kathíemai, meaning "to thrust into" or "to send down" (ie, the catheter allowed fluid to be "sent down" from the body).
Catheters from the Roman Empire, 1st century AD
For well over 3,500 years urinary catheters have been used to drain bladders that fail to drain themselves properly. The civilisations of antiquity used various implements as catheters. For instance, the ancient Chinese used onion stalks, while the ancient Egyptians made do with hollow reeds from the Nile, as did the ancient Syrians. The Romans, the Greeks and the Hindu peoples tended to use tubes fashioned from wood or precious metals (brass, copper, gold and lead). The ancients didn’t have the advantage of sterility and flexibility available to later technologies for creating catheters.
Jumping ahead to more recent times, one step forward in catheters in the 18th century was the result of an invention by United States “founding father” Benjamin Franklin. Franklin created the silver catheter, a more comfortable apparatus for the patient. For 200 years most catheters were made of rubber, while more flexible they were prone to parts breaking off after insertion, leaving the patient vulnerable to the danger of infection. In the 20th century latex red rubber catheters (the Foley balloon catheter) arrived which were popular due to their enhanced flexibility. Later on improvements in materials as well as greater sterilisation saw advances in catheter production and the use of vinyl, latex-free and silicone for catheters (‘The History and Evolution of Unitary Catheters’, 180 °Medical, www.180medical.com).
 |
| Ben Franklin’s invention |
