Development of Endoscopy

Physicians experimented with ways to view inside the living body from at least the mid nineteenth century, when the German physician Adolf Kussmaul, reportedly inspired by watching a sword swallower, attempted to pass a rigid metal tube down a patient's throat, though the candle and oil lamp light sources of the day made it hard to see anything once the tube was in place. The word endoscope itself was coined in 1855 by the optician Charles Chevalier to describe a related instrument, a urethroscope built by Antonin Jean Desormeaux. The problem of internal illumination was not solved until 1894 or 1895, when the Scottish physician John Macintyre built a self illuminated endoscope at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, one of the first hospitals with mains electricity, to examine the larynx, establishing the basic self lit design that later endoscopes for the stomach, bladder, and abdominal cavity would follow.