Surgery without scars - the genuine article!
Curiosities – collections of the weird and wonderful
American College of Surgeons
College questionnaire for all surgeons
Quick orthopaedic link
MTAS / MMC

Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery [NOTES]
On April 2nd 2007, at the University Hospital of Strasbourg, Professor Jacques Marescaux and his team successfully performed the first no scar surgery. This first human “incisionless” operation was carried out using a flexible endoscope for transvaginal cholecystectomy in a 30-year-old woman with symptomatic gallstones.

This world first, called "operation Anubis", was presented at the Japanese Congress of Surgery in Osaka on April 6th 2007. The project was named for Anubis the ancient god in Egyptian mythology known for the restoration of life to Osiris through mummification using long, flexible instruments . The Egyptians embalmed their dead, especially their pharaohs, to preserve them, since they thought that this helped them live for ever. Click the image for the WebSurg link and watch the video.

Curiosities

Collections of the weird and wonderful! You would like an online resource replete with anomalies and curiosities – you have found it right here. Here are just a few examples.

Joseph Lister - This single Web page is a plain-text electronic version of 'On the antiseptic principle of the practice of surgery', an article by Joseph Lister originally published in the Lancet (vol.2, 1867), relating to antiseptic surgical methods

Germ Theory - Again a single Web page with a plain-text version of 'Germ theory and its applications to medicine' by Louis Pasteur, originally read before the French Academy of Science in April 1878 and published in Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Sciences (vol. 86). The text is part of the Internet modern history sourcebook, edited by Paul Halsall of Fordham University.

Or how about …William Harvey on The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In Animals, 1628

I found these amongst many in the freely available Modern History Sourcebook

 

American College of Surgeons

Here are the details of the Annual Clinical Congress being help in New Orleans this year.

Quick orthopaedic link

Orthopaedic Web links (OWL) provide the largest collection of peer reviewed orthopaedic weblinks on the Internet.

Questionnaire

Please visit the College online questionnaire. The information is likely to be extremely interesting and valuable. You can find it here. It will be live from Monday 27th May for a limited time only.

MTAS / MMC

I promised you more on MTAS / MMC this month. Well the story breaks day by day. The scrapping of MTAS was announced on the 14th May by the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. - the BBC news announcement can be accessed by clicking the image.

In the meantime some of the differences between the Scottish and English "solutions" will mean that there is a great deal more to do to sort this out. Click here to see a letter from Evelyn Dykes, Chair, NES Transitional Board for Surgery, summarising this issue.

Till next month

Yours

David Galloway