Syringe

A syringe is an instrument for injecting or extracting liquids or gases. It consists of a sliding plunger that fits tightly in a precise cylindrical tube. The plunger can be pulled and pushed inside the tube, letting the syringe draw in or expel the fluid through an orifice at the open end of the tube.

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The word "syringe" is derived from the Greek syrinx, meaning "Pan flute", "tube").

The syringe itself has been known since ancient times. One of the innovative and delicate eye surgery techniques used by the Romans was the removal of cataracts by couching. This involved using a sophisticated thin needle syringe to remove the clouding.

During the 1st century AD Aulus Cornelius Celsus mentions the use of piston syringes to treat medical complications in his De Medicina.

De medicina

In the 9th century an Egyptian surgeon used a glass suction tube to remove cataracts from a patient.

The Irish physician Francis Rynd invented the first syringe with a hollow needle in 1844. He used it to inject a sedative to treat neuralgia, revolutionizing medicine with a single push of a plunger.

Scottish doctor Alexander Wood (December 10, 1817 –February 26, 1884), invented in 1853 a hypodermic syringe with a needle fine enough to pierce the skin. Wood's innovation allowed drugs to be administered intravenously without the patient's skin having to be cut first. It is said he found inspiration in the sting of a honeybee.

The hypodermic syringe was a breakthrough in anesthetics and was originally, mainly used for giving injections of morphine as a painkiller. Doctors believed that morphine is not addictive if it bypasses the digestive tract and the needle Wood perfected allowed the drug to be injected directly into the blood stream, thus avoiding the stomach.

There is a story in circulation that Wood's wife, Rebecca Massey, was an intravenous morphine addict and was the first person the over dose from a morphine injection. However, according to her gravestone in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh, she outlived her husband and died on February 6, 1895.

Alexander Wood

After the initial failure of his opera William Tell, Gioachino Rossini gave up composing and decided to concentrate on cooking. He produced some inventive recipes and devised a way of stuffing macaroni with foie gras by means of a silver syringe.

In 1954, Becton, Dickinson and Company created the first mass-produced disposable syringe and needle. It was developed for Dr. Jonas Salk's mass administration of the new Salk polio vaccine for one million American children.

Phil Brooks was an African-American inventor from Kansas who received a patent for a Disposable Syringe on April 9, 1974. The disposable syringe that he invented was designed to be easier and safer to use than previous models. The patent number for his invention was indeed U.S. Patent 3,802,434.

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