AMER MEDICAL GAZETTE VOL 9

Excerpt from American Medical Gazette, Vol. 9: January, 1858You must, therefore, pass a catheter; you may take a silver or elastic instrument; you may take one with along curve, or a short curve, or you may pass an elastic catheter with no curve at all. You are all familiar with the ordinary manoeuvre required in passing a large prostatic catheter; you get the point down to the neck of the bladder, and then, finding an obstacle, you depress the handle, and thus tilt up the point, and the catheter then enters the bladder. It now and then will happen to you that you cannot get the ordinary prostatic catheter into the bladder, and you try other instruments with like want of success; you then use the elastic catheter, giving it the peculiar curve described and delineated by Mr. Hey by withdraw ing the stilet after the point has reached the prostate; still this will fail you occasionally, and you may exhaust your whole stock of curved instruments unsuccessfully, and you will be surprised to find that a moderate-sized elastic catheter, without the stilet, and made straight before its introduction, will pilot its way gradually between the lobes, and reach the bladder. I have so often seen this, that I really think it better to use the elastic catheter first of all. You cannot do any harm by it, which is more than can be said of the use of the silver instrument.Now, if you fail in the introduction of the catheter, what are you to do? The patient must be relieved; and it is a rare thing, indeed, that a skillful surgeon is hamed in relieving cases of retention of urine from enlarged prostates; but such cases I have heard of I never saw it, but it has occurred to the most experienced, and will, no doubt, occur again. Should this unfortunately happen to you, you are te-0 commended to push the catheter through the back of the prostate.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.