What Is a Surgical Suture?

Surgical suture refers to the special thread used for ligation and hemostasis, suture hemostasis, and tissue suture during surgical operations or trauma treatment. Divided into absorbable lines and non-absorbable lines.

Surgical suture

Surgical suture refers to the special thread used for ligation and hemostasis, suture hemostasis, and tissue suture during surgical operations or trauma treatment. Divided into absorbable lines and non-absorbable lines.

Chinese name

Surgical suture

Foreign name

Operation suture

Use

Suture the wound

Classification

Absorbable (combination line) and non-absorbable

Application

Surgery

Purpose

Ligation and hemostasis

Surgical sutures: generally can be divided into two categories: absorbable and non-absorbable threads:

Absorbability refers to the ability to be degraded by the body over time. Therefore, sutures can be divided into absorbable and non-absorbable threads. Absorbable threads are commonly used to refer to sutures that lose most of their tensile strength within 60 days of entering the body. Suture absorption is achieved through tissue response to the suture. Sutures that need to be buried in the body and deep in the wound are generally absorbable, while non-absorbable sutures are used to suture the outer layer of the wound and will eventually be removed. In rare cases, non-absorbable threads are also used when long-term tensile strength is needed in deep tissues

For thousands of years, suture materials of different materials have been used and debated, but have remained largely unchanged. The needle is made of bone or metal (such as silver, copper, aluminum bronze wire). Sutures are made of plant material (linen, hemp, and cotton) or animal material (hair, tendons, arteries, muscle strips or nerves, silk, sheep gut). Thorns are used in African culture, and ants are used in other places to sew, which tricks insects to bite the sides of the wound and then twists their heads.

The earliest records of surgical sutures date back to ancient Egypt in 3000 BC, and the oldest known sutures are on mummy in 1100 BC. The first detailed written account of suture wounds and the use of suture materials came from Su Shi Ruta, a saint and physician in India from 500 BC. Hippocrates, the "father of medicine" in Greece, and later Olus Cornelius Celsus in Rome described the basic suture technique. The first description of intestinal suture was the 2nd-century Roman doctor Galen, [1] and some people believe that it was the 10th-century Andalusian surgeon Dhalawi. According to records, once the strings of the Dhahrawirut were swallowed by a monkey, he discovered that the gut was absorbable. Since then, manufacture of medical sheep gut.

Joseph Lister introduced a huge change in suture technology, and he advocated routine disinfection of all sutures. In the 1860s, he first tried to sterilize "Carbonate Sheep Gut", and two decades later he sterilized Chrom Sheep Gut. In 1906, a sterile sheep gut was treated with iodine.

The next big leap took place in the 20th century. With the development of the chemical industry, the first synthetic thread was made in the 1930s, and many absorptive and non-absorptive synthetic threads were developed rapidly. The first synthetic thread was made of polyvinyl alcohol in 1931. Polyester threads were developed in the 1950s, and radiation sterilization of sheep gut threads and polyester was later developed. Polyglycolic acid was discovered in the 1960s and used in the manufacture of sutures in the 1970s. [1] Most sutures are now made from polymer fibers. Of the ancient materials, only silk and gut were still used-although not often. In Europe and Japan, the bowel is banned for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and silk is sometimes used for vascular and ENT surgery.