Jean Civiale (1792–1867) was a French surgeon and urologist, who, in 1832, invented a surgical instrument (the lithotrite) and performed transurethral lithotripsy, the first known minimally invasive surgery, to crush stones inside the bladder without having to open the abdomen (lithotomy). To remove a calculus, Civiale inserted his instrument through the urethra and bored holes in the stone. Afterwards, he crushed it with the same instrument and ...
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Jean Civiale (1792–1867) was a French surgeon and urologist, who, in 1832, invented a surgical instrument (the lithotrite) and performed transurethral lithotripsy, the first known minimally invasive surgery, to crush stones inside the bladder without having to open the abdomen (lithotomy). To remove a calculus, Civiale inserted his instrument through the urethra and bored holes in the stone. Afterwards, he crushed it with the same instrument and aspired the resulting fragments or let them flow normally with urine.
Civiale founded the first urology service in the world, at the Necker Hospital in Paris.
Civiale has been also recently recognized as a pioneer of evidence-based medicine. In 1835, the Académie des Sciences in Paris commissioned a report on the statistical research that had been conducted by him on a wider scale throughout Europe, with the aim of proving that bladder lithotripsy was superior to lithotomy. Civiale used for the first time the method of comparing the relative...
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