SPECIAL ARTICLES   

Panminerva Medica 2000 March;42(1):87-90

Copyright © 2009 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

History of laparoscopic surgery

Vecchio R., MacFayden B. V., Palazzo F.

From the Department of Surgery University of Catania, Italy *University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, USA

Laparoscopic sur­gery, ­whose devel­op­ment has ­been so impres­sive in the ­last ­decade, was initial­ly intro­duced at the begin­ning of ­this cen­tu­ry by Dimitri Ott, Georg Kelling and Hans Christian Jacobeus. Von Ott inspect­ed the abdom­i­nal cav­ity of a preg­nant wom­an in 1901 and after­wards Georg Kelling per­formed a pro­ce­dure, ­called “koe­li­os­co­pie”, clos­er to the def­i­ni­tion of mod­ern lapa­ros­co­py. In the ­same ­year Jacobeus pub­lished his ­first ­report of ­what he ­called “Laparothorakoskopie”. In the fol­low­ing ­years sev­er­al ­authors in Europe and in the United States per­formed lapar­os­cop­ic pro­ce­dures for diag­nos­tic pur­pos­es. It was ­only ­with the intro­duc­tion of the rod-­lens opti­cal ­system and of ­the cold ­light ­fiber-­glass illu­mi­na­tion ­that lapa­ros­co­py ­became ­more pop­u­lar espe­cial­ly in the gyne­col­o­gist depart­ments. At ­this ­time lapa­ros­co­py in gen­er­al sur­gery was main­ly per­formed for the diag­nos­is of liv­er dis­or­ders and abdom­i­nal trau­ma, ­until the intui­tion of Lukichev in 1983 and Muhe in 1985 who per­formed ­their per­son­al tech­nique of lapar­os­cop­ic chol­e­cys­tec­to­my in ­humans. Their rudi­men­tal tech­niques did not ­receive the atten­tion ­they prob­ably ­deserved and increas­ing inter­est in lapa­ros­co­py ­among gen­er­al sur­geons devel­oped ­only ­after the French gyne­col­o­gist Mouret per­formed in 1987 the ­first acknowl­edged lapar­os­cop­ic chol­e­cys­tec­to­my by ­means of ­four tro­cars. Operative lapa­ros­co­py has ­advanced sur­pris­ing­ly in the ­last ten ­years. Several oper­a­tive pro­ce­dures ­have ­been per­formed by ­this new ­approach. After its tumul­tu­ous ­debut, lapar­os­cop­ic sur­gery is now enter­ing a ­phase of slow­er devel­op­ment and now­a­days it is impos­sible to pre­dict the imme­di­ate and ­long-­term evo­lu­tion of the tech­nique.