Applications

The notion of using heat to treat tissue can be found in ancient Egyptian papyri, carrying through to ferrum candens (iron cautery) in the ancient world, right up to the surgical use of ligatura candens (cutting loop) after the invention of galvanocautery in the 19th century.

However, it was only in the 20th century that the development of modern high-frequency surgery (HF surgery) began: fulguration (Rivière, 1900, spark gap), electrodesiccation (Clark, 1907, superheating), bipolar electrocoagulation (Doyen, 1909) and electrotomy (Wyeth, 1920s, tube generator). There then followed the first combination device consisting of a tube generator for cutting and a spark-gap transmitter for haemostasis (Bovie, 1928), the first universal tube-based devices in 1955, and transistor-based devices in the 1970s, and the argon beamer (Morrison, 1976). Since the beginning of the 1990s, HF surgical devices controlled by microprocessors have been available. For the first time, they allowed numerous parameters to be varied in order to precisely determine the current required for the relevant treatment.

The various electrosurgical procedures, devices and instruments are constantly being developed and refined in order to safeguard the health of patients, to streamline the amount of time required for surgical intervention, and to keep costs as low as possible.