Jean Civiale

Jean Civiale (1792 to 1867) was a French surgeon and urologist who is remembered for turning the removal of bladder stones from an open operation into a procedure done through the urethra. In 1823 he devised an instrument called the lithotrite and used it to perform transurethral lithotripsy: the instrument was passed into the bladder, bored holes in the stone, and crushed it so that the fragments could be aspirated or pass out with the urine. This spared patients the abdominal incision of lithotomy, and the source describes it as the first known minimally invasive surgery. Civiale founded the first urology service in the world, at the Necker Hospital in Paris. He also compared outcomes in a large statistical study: a report commissioned by the Academie des Sciences in 1835 found far lower mortality for lithotripsy than for lithotomy, and he received the Montyon Prize in 1836, so he is now also counted among the pioneers of evidence-based medicine. His student Sir Henry Thompson carried the instrument and technique to Britain, and Civiale became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1840.