About the Museum of Hoaxes
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about whatever dubious-sounding claims come across our path on a day-by-day basis. In our archives we have hundreds of articles about the most fascinating and notorious deceptions throughout history, from the middle ages to the present.
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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.