[Cystoscopy (1879-1979) (centennial of a transcendental invention)]

Abstract

The authors make a historical review of the successive stages in Man's attempt to be able to observe directly the inside of the cavities of the human body and more precisely of the bladder, which from the start long ago, led to the apparatuses invented during the first half of the 19th Century (Bozzini, Ségalas, Bonbalgini, Fisher, Avery, Desormeaux, Hacken, Cruise, Grünfeld, Luys, etc.) until the 9th March 1879 when Maximilian Nitze presented in the Vienna Medical Society and published in the journal Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift his brilliant invention of the apparatus which completely changed the knowledge of vesical pathology: the cystoscope. Reference is made to the successive alternations that the primitive cystoscope invented by Nitze has undergone before arriving at the present-day cystoscopes of such great precision and usefulness in hospitals. Reference is also made to another series of creations designed by Nitze, such as a cystoscope for ureteral catheterism (which, however, was of no practical use and it was not until Albarrán's creation that the catheterism of the ureters could be achieved), an operating cystoscope, a ureteral probe with a dilating ball to enable stones to be expelled from the ureter, a "camera" for endoscopic photography, etc.