Surgical sewing, or suturing', is a slow and tedious process. The technique of surgical sewing has been used in one way or another since ancient times, but it had never been automated until the autostapler was marketed in the mid 1960s. U.S. Surgical Corporation made the original instrument, which was a monkey wrench with a gun trigger. Disposable cartridges could be placed in the instrument with different sizes of suture placed in different patterns depending on the cartridge chosen. When the autostapler was placed against a. patient's skin and the trigger was pulled, it placed a series of tiny metal staples about three to four inches across at a time, closing the incision. The staples were made of stainless steel, nonreactive in human tissue. Dr. Mark Ravitch of the University of Chicago School of Medicine was one of the first to develop an...