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From the Archives: Emile Coude, inventor of the Coude Catheter
Status: Medical Hoax
The Coude Catheter is a curved tip catheter. The bend in the tip apparently is useful for inserting the catheter through the urethra into the bladder. You can buy one on Amazon for $7.78.Back in 1957, The Leech, the journal of the students' society of the Welsh National School of Medicine at Cardiff, published an article about how the Coude Catheter got its name. It claimed it was named after a nineteenth-century French doctor, Emile Coude. The Leech offered a short biography of Coude and even had a picture of him.
However, Emile Coude was a hoax. There never was such a man. Coude is actually a French word meaning elbow or bent. But the hoax almost fooled the editors of a medical textbook, A Short Practice of Surgery, before they realized their error at the last minute and removed all references to him from the galley proofs.
I've got the full details of this obscure medical hoax in the archive.
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Categories: Health/Medicine Posted by Alex on Fri May 22, 2009 |
Comments (4) |
| More from the Hoax Museum Archives: | |||
So, after reading the full story in the database, what it sounds like is that this Hercule Coude asked for his grand-uncle's catheter, and someone mistook that to mean that Emile Coude invented it, rather than preferred to use that type over the others that were available.
Seems like a simple misunderstanding rather than an attempted hoax to me.
Posted by Crafty Dragon in Montana on Sat May 23, 2009 at 02:03 PM
Seems like a simple misunderstanding rather than an attempted hoax to me.
The letter was also a joke, though, Crafty. 
Posted by Accipiter on Mon May 25, 2009 at 12:47 PM
When I was child, my Dad assured me that Turtle Wax was not made from turtles, but named after a Mister Turtle who invented it. He also told me that the word gullible can;t be found in the dictionary. Bad Dad, down boy. Roll over
Posted by Hairy Houdini on Tue May 26, 2009 at 12:32 PM
I tell people that the O ring was invented by Daniel O. (This works better spoken than written.) Sometime I can get the to believe it for a few seconds. Until I tell them that Daniel was the cousin of O Henry.
Posted by Bill Rock in Minnetonka, Minnesota, USA on Tue May 26, 2009 at 08:14 PM
Comments: Page 1 of 1 pages