Surgery


Lenticular

 

This  instrument is doubtless a lenticular (originally I took it for a tartar remover), comes from an antique shop in Innsbruck.

 

Here the description of the instrument in the "Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, Paris 1818":
"Lenticulaire: petit couteau fixe, immobile sur son some, et dont la lame, tranchante seulement d'un côté, est garnie à son extrémité d'un petit bouton de forme triangulaire. On se sert de ce couteau pour détruire les inégalités qui se rentrétrent quelquefois aux bords osseux formé par l'application d'une couronne de trépan. Le bouton lenticulaire, dans ce cas, sert à protéger les membranes qui recouvrent le cerveau pendant qu'on fait usage du couteau; It is also part of the faciliter l'usage, en se plaçant entre le cerveau et la boîte osseuse qui le recouvre".

 

... a rasp used in ancient neurosurgery. Therefore, you will find similar devices under the name "raspartoire" or "râpe". In France they were later called "rugine". The "lenticular", as the English call it, was round-headed, but also, as in the present case, a pentagonal head, the tip of which was turned towards the surgeon, but whose rounded lower edge was pressed against the meninges, an injury the same while the 4 side edges smoothly rasped the bony edges of the trephination site.

 

The lenticulars were found in trepanning utensils until around 1920, when they gradually disappeared from the company's offer. The "Berlin Waarenhaus" offered around 1910 none more, but the Fa. Esculape, 1910 by P.J. Mountain, Grossstrasse 17.