Periscopes not only allow you to peek around the corner into your neighbor’s garden unnoticed, but also to explore the inner workings of a body. Over the past few decades, endoscopy has become a permanent fixture in medical diagnostics and therapy. As early as thousands of years ago, the first doctors tried to get an idea of their patients’ state of health not only by looking at the outside. They first used catheters to empty the urinary bladder, with the idea that it was possible to gain an insight into the inner workings of a living person through these natural orifices.
Since then, not only has a lot of time passed, but the methods of illuminating human interiors and thus detecting diseases have been revolutionized by new technical possibilities and have in turn caused a revolution in medical diagnostics and therapy. Endoscopies, or reflections of body cavities, take their name from the Greek – endo means inside, skopie means looking around.
A brief history of endoscopy
Bronze or tin catheters were inserted into the urinary bladder as early as ancient Egypt 3,000 years before Christ. In 400 B.C., the Greek physician Hippocrates used so-called “specula” to examine the mouth, vaginal and rectal areas. These were simple rigid tubes used to spread open the orifices of the body and probably did not cause any outbursts of enthusiasm from the patient. In addition, they did not allow for deeper penetration or good illumination of the examination area.
For a long time, sufficient illumination posed the problem for inquisitive physicians: They tried to bring light from candles into the darkness of the patients by means of mirrors, hence the German name of the examination method still in use today: Spiegelung. It was not until the invention of the incandescent lamp, patented by Edison in 1879, that it became possible to supply the hollow organs of the human body with so much light that the thin optical instruments inserted through the orifices of the body returned clearly visible images to the physician.
