Charriere surgical set
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Charriere surgical set in original case and key with original scarificator, which is rare. The instruments are made of steel with ebony handles and are all signed ‘Charriere A Paris’. The set contains four sharp knives in varying sizes, a screw tourniquet with two pellets, a saw and spare blade for smaller operations, a clamp, a cutting plier, cleft pallet needle.
40 x 17 x 7,5 cm.
About Joseph-Frédéric-Benoît Charrière
Parisian cutler Joseph-Frédéric-Benoît Charrière (1803-1876) contributed greatly to surgical disciplines with innovative tools, but his legacy is the gauge system he developed in 1842 that is still used for catheters, probes, and dilators.
Most importantly he created the catheter scale that, despite not being favoured in its country of origin, became an international standard and is known today as the French system. The classification of sounds, catheters, and bougies has undergone many variations throughout the years, but the French scale still holds in current medical practice as an accurate and nearly universal sizing tool.
Concerning urological operations, the different instruments for lithotripsy designed by Charriere have to be mentioned. Urology was an emerging discipline in the first half of the 19th century. In developing the instruments, he worked together with famous surgeons like Civiale, Segalas, Amussat, Heurteloup and Leroy d’Etiolles. The instruments were not only designed for use inside the urinary bladder. There were also instruments called ‘lithotriteurs urethraux’ which were specially designed for extracting stones from the urethra. Another instrument was called ‘lithometre’ and was used for measuring the stone size and for gaining more information about the form of the stones inside the bladder. The search for better urological instruments and improved techniques will never end.
