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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Microsurgery Tool | ||
| Miniaturized device for surgical precision. |
When Brand Fanshaw crash-landed, his injuries were extensive. So much so, that Charlie Masson needed all of his skills - and his microsurgery tool.
| In his slender hands he held a surgical instrument he had invented. It was a marvel! There was a long steel arm or standard that could be clamped on the end of an operating table. At the end of the arm was a binocular microscope. Beneath the latter were hundreds of screw buttons. And gathered right where the microscope was focused - where a needle-point beam of intense light could be projected for illumination - there was a ring of tiny metal prongs. You turned the screws below and the prongs moved - any or all of them - in any plane or direction you could mention, and with caliper slowness, minuteness and precision. At the end of each prong was a surgical tool - blades, tweezers, probes - so fine you could just see them with the naked eye.
Micro-surgery!.. With an apparatus like that, it wasn't hard to believe that one could sort out and rejoin properly each of the countless, individual fibers of, say, a severed optic nerve. |
| Technovelgy from Masson's Secret,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1939 Additional resources -
|
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.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Masson's Secret
More Ideas
and Technology by Raymond Z. Gallun
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Tech news articles related to works by Raymond Z. Gallun
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- 3D HD da Vinci Surgical Robotics
- Robotic Microsurgery Instrument Goes Anywhere
- Hand-Held Robot Operates On Man's Prostate
- Six Amazing Surgical Robots In One Video
- Mini Robot Uses 2 mm Surgical Tools
- Robotic Physician Assistant Has Steady 'Hands'
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'Alex did not find it surprising that people... were electronically minting their own cash.'
'I had determined that my first attempt should be a visit to Mars.'
To follow the user like a pet while carrying their cargo!
'Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish.'
'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
