Some old books and ancient coins from the Hunter Collection.

in the embarrassing situation of having little or no catgut industry. Some far-sighted Edinburgh surgeons, realizing the problems, requested a local pharmacist, George Merson to undertake the commercial manufacture of this material. This he did in an old manse at St. John's Hill in the Pleasance, Edinburgh, and by the end of the war the business was well under way. About this time Merson began to sell eyeless needled sutures where one strand of suture material is attached into the butt of the needle. These patented products were called 'Mersutures' and greatly reduced the tissue damage caused by pulling through a double strand of material. Of the manytechnical advances in suture manufacture little more need be said other than to mention the introduction of sterilization by irradiation in 1960 using a Cobalt 60 isotope. This allowed sutures to be sealed in their final package and then sterilized, thereby eliminating the dangers and difficulties of aseptic transfers. This revolutionary development was a breakthrough which brought in its wake many improvements in packaging. G. F. Merson had by this time become Ethicon Ltd. and although the development of these businesses is a fascinating story, it was felt that the early history of suture was of more general interest. Finally, a brief description of Ethicon today. The suture industry is, it is suggested, much bigger than many imagine. In Edinburgh alone we employ over a thousand people, use the intestines of 26,000 sheep per day and manufacture enough suture and ligature material in a year to stretch threequarters of the way round the Equator. These materials comprise catgut which accounts for nearly half of all sutures and ligatures, the remainder being mainly nonabsorbables such as silk, linen, steel wire and synthetics such as polyester, nylon and the newly developed polypropylene. Several years ago a reconstituted absorbable collagen suture was introduced and last year a suture company marketed the first absorbable synthetic. These new synthetics, absorbable and non-absorbable, are obviously the forerunners of new generations of sutures which, with other means of coating tissue such as physiological glue, indicate an exciting prospect for this unusual industry whose history has been touched on in this paper. Guy de Chauliac, writing in 1350, said, 'We are children sitting on the neck of a giant-we can see all he sees and something more besides.'