How Technology Shaped Modern Surgery

Abstract

The history of endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery is the story of technological advances in illumination, optics, and imaging that allowed operations to be performed within the body. After invention of the incandescent bulb by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison in 1879, the basic design of early cystoscopes remained unchanged during the first half of the 20th century. Three inventions made endoscopy and laparoscopy possible. Invented in the 1950s, the Hopkins glass rod lens system was so elegant and effective—it gave images 80 times better than traditional Galilean optics—that endoscopes of the same design remain in use today. Also, originating in the same decade, fiber optics had in turn two major contributions: Flexible endoscopy and the transfer of light from a high voltage source into the body to illuminate internal structures and organs. Solid-state camera technology, developed in the late 1970s and 1980s, gave images of exceptional detail from a camera chip at the eyepiece of an endoscope. The panorama of advances created by the same technologies—global telecommunications, cellphone cameras, images from interplanetary space probes—reveals endoscopy and laparoscopic surgery as two more examples of today's technological age.