Coudé tip catheter

EMILE COUDÉ (1800-1870)

Although the catheter he designed is in common use today. Little is known of Coudé in this country.

He was born the son of a country doctor in the small town of Villeneuve-la­-Comtesse, near the west coast port of La Rochelle. As a boy he loved to play around the ancient castle with its fourteenth century keep, which is still a well-known tourist attraction of the region.

As he grew up he attended lessons in the local school, but in his spare time he loved to accompany his father on his rounds in the small coach-and-pair. Occa­sionally he would be allowed inside a house to look at a patient with his father (a special treat, this). but usually he had to wait outside, looking after the horses.

On one of these occasions. Pierre, the larger of the two horses, was stung by a wasp. Frightened, he bolted, causing the other horse, Phillippe, to run off as well. Emile was in the carriage at the time. He tried in vain to halt the horses by pulling on the reins, until, as a wheel went into a small pot-hole in the rough country road, he was thrown off. He was not badly hurt, but a long gash on his right leg left him a scar there for the rest of his days.

As time went by, Emile spent more and more time with his father, visiting patients. In his twenties, he went to Paris to study under the great Dupuytren at Hotel Dieu. Like most people he found Dupuytren’s nature unattractive, though he was certainly a great surgeon and teacher. Coudé himself was one of the “brigand’s” assistants at the first removal of a mandible ever performed. It is not known exactly how long Coudé spent in Paris. He said later that although he had undoubtedly learned much from Dupuytren, he had learned much more from his father.

On his return to his native town, Emile Coudé played an ever-increasing part in his father’s practice. But he had always been interested in surgery, and so in 1832 he accepted the post of assistant surgeon at Niort, seventeen miles north of his home town. It was here that he designed the catheter which bears his name.

In cases of retention of urine he found the catheters then available were difficult to use, being either perfectly straight and rigid, or else, as he put it in his memoirs, “bent to many weird shapes. as if a catheter should copy exactly the bends of the male urethra.”

After trying many different designs, he hit upon the well-known “bi-Coudé” catheter. Other doctors referred to it as the “Coudé catheter“, but its inventor’s natural modesty caused him to add the prefix “bi” (because it had two bends) in order to hide his name. The first published description of the instrument appeared in 1835

Coudé had married in 1830, and his son Robert began to learn medicine from his father, as Emile had done before him. When Emile Coudé retired in 1865, his son was already an assistant surgeon at Bordeaux. Before he died, in 1870, Emile expressed a wish to be buried in the place of his birth. He was buried on June the fourteenth and his tombstone can still be seen in the small cemetery attached to the beautiful thirteenth century church at Villeneuve-la-Comtesse

**The only known portrait of Emile Coudé