REPAIR OF SMALL ARTERIES WITH CONTACT CEMENT AND TEFLON GRAFT.

Abstract

EPAIR and replacement of vessels, particularly those of small caliber, have presented a difficult problem in surgery. I t is recorded 43 that in 1759 Hallowell, an English surgeon, sutured an artery in man for the first time in medical history. Some years later, in 177~, Asman 2 experimentally sutured femoral arteries in 4 dogs. However, it was not until the latter part of 1800 that rather extensive work and animal experimentation in vascular surgery was begun. In 1889 Jassinowsky 3s published the results of his experiments on the carotid arteries of dogs, horses and calves and stated that the arterial wounds could be sutured with preservation of their lumen. The technical difficulties and unsatisfactory results of suturing divided vessels prompted Robert Abbe in 1894 ~ to use artificial tubes for end-to-end anastomosis. He devised a small hourglass-shaped tube made of thin glass to join the two ends of the divided femoral artery in a dog. Three years later a small ivory prosthesis was introduced by Nitze 49 for intima-to-intima anastomosis of a divided vessel. In 1900 Pay# ~ used absorbable magnesium prosthesis and subsequently Jensen 39 from Copenhagen applied bone prosthesis for anastomosing a divided vessel. Carrel 7 and Carrel and Guthrie 1~ obtained remarkable results in vascular surgery in the early 1900s which started their auto-, homo-, heteroand finally organtransplantation experiments on laboratory animals. Their method was a meticulous technique of suturing using silk. Although this technique was accepted by most surgeons,