Hümér Hültl

Hümér Hültl was a Hungarian surgeon born on 14 July 1868 in Felsőbánya, in Szatmár County, who trained in medicine at the University of Budapest and practised at St Rokus Hospital and St Stephen's Hospital in Budapest. He was known for strict discipline in the operating room, for insisting on high standards of cleanliness, and for quick, elegant technique that earned him the nickname Paganini of the Knife. Troubled by serious infections that followed abdominal operations when sutures failed, he conceived a stapler for hollow internal organs that used metal staples, and with the designer Victor Fischer he built the Fischer-Hültl stapler, first used in surgery in May 1908. The device was heavy and slow to prepare, and only about fifty were made, but the idea was refined by his student Aladár Petz and later by others, and surgical staplers remain in wide use. Hültl died in Budapest on 18 January 1940.