Types of electrosurgical Systems

There are two types of electrosurgical systems • Monopolar or unipolar • Bipolar • Ligasure vessel sealing system (LVSS).

Cautery in medieval surgery:

Hot Knife

a unique palaeopathological case Cautery is a fundamental tool in ancient and medieval surgery. According to a aphorism of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, “Those diseases which medicines do not cure, iron cures; those which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable”. 1 This statement was accepted in Roman medicine and then by the Byzantine and Islamic surgical practices in the Middle Ages. 2 Despite this widespread acceptance, the bioarchaeological evidence of the use of cautery is extremely rare.3 We present a unique and original case of cautery dating back to the 11th century, discovered in 2018 on the mummy of an Italian saint. The mummified body of Saint Davinus of Armenia has been preserved for about 1000 years in San Michele in Foro, a basilica church in Lucca, Italy. In the hagiographic sources, we read that Davinus left Armenia and arrived in Lucca in the year 1050, after a long pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome. He died in a hospital annexed to the church of San Michele in Foro during a pilgrimage stop to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Veneration of the saint’s body was already attested in the 11th and 12th centuries. 4 On March 26–29, 2018, a complete study of the body, including macroscopic and radiological examination (CT total body), revealed the natural mummy of a young man aged about 25 years. Two traumatic lesions of the skull, which appear not to have been fatal, were discovered: a superficial cutting wound on the left frontal bone (5 cm long, 0·5 cm wide), produced by a toothed blade, and an elliptical (2 × 1 cm) wound with depressed fracture, produced by a blunt weapon on the right coronal suture (figure). Around the elliptical lesion we observed a wider scar with a thin margin (0·5 mm), pentagonal in shape, evidently caused by the application of a red -hot iron, a cautery with a pentagonal head (figure). The cautery was probably used to stop the bleeding of a wound that had been previously cleaned.

Electrosurgery


Bovie (physicist) and Cushing (Neurosurgeon) has been credited for the invention of electrosurgery. In 1941, Power and Barnes were the first to report the human performance of laparoscopic electrosurgical female sterilization using Monopolar cautery [8]. With time, further development and popularization of laparoscopic surgery leads to bipolar instrument used by Frangenheim and Rioux.

Typical Am Tube Amplifier