Medicine: "Microsurgery: Sew Small"

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

But in the
1960s, surgeon's began using microscopes to sew what previously had been
almost invisible blood vessels and nerves in limbs. Their sewing
technique had been developed on large blood vessels over a half century
earlier but could not be used in microsurgery until the needles and
sutures became small enough. The surgical technique, still widely used
today, had taken the frustrating unreliability out of sewing slippery,
round-ended blood vessels by ingeniously turning them into triangles. To
do this, a cut end of a blood vessel was stitched at three equidistant
points and pulled slightly apart to give an anchored, triangular shape.
This now lent itself to easier, more dependable stitching and paved the
way for microsurgery where as many as twenty stitches will have to be made
in a blood vessel three millimetres thick. The needle used for this can
be just 70 millimetres wide, only ten times the width of a human blood
cell.

All this technology is focused on getting body ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

CITE THIS PAGE: