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"My father was a master mechanic; I grew up with a screwdriver in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other."
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When Brand Fanshaw crash-landed, his injuries were extensive. So much so, that Charlie Masson needed all of his skills - and his microsurgery tool.
Specialized microsurgical instruments were not really created until the 1960's. They were used to reconnect very fine blood vessels on the order of 1 mm in diameter; the very best of surgeons were limited to working on blood vessels 3-4 mm in size.
As far as I know, the first use of the term "micro-surgery" combined with a description of an actual technique was in "Micro-surgery in Chronic Simple Glaucoma" read by Otto Barkin to the California Medical Association in 1937.
He really didn't use a specialized, miniaturized instrument, nor did he use any kind of mechanism to reduce his large hand movements to tiny instrument movements.
The web seems to be full of references to Jules Jacobson being the first person to coin the word "microsurgery" (which is obviously untrue). Jacobson used a microscope (ordinarily used by ENT surgeons working on the inner ear) combined with jeweler's instruments.
Compare to the microrobot from The Scarab (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the ultra-microrobot from Menace in Miniature (1937) also by Gallun, waldo from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, the golden shuttles from The Mechanical Mice (1941) by Maurice Hugi, the autofac nanorobots from Autofac (1955) by Philip K. Dick, the nanomachine swarm from The Invincible (1954) by Stanislaw Lem, the Christmas Bush robot from Rocheworld by Robert Forward and the robot cells from Robot City (1987) by Michael Kube-McDowell. Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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