Gutta Percha
BAPRAS/786
Date 1917 -1960
What Is This Equipment?
Alston, The Dental Manufacturing Company, Barnet, London.
Gutta Percha is a natural latex produced by rubber trees in South East Asia, notably Malaysia.
The Dental Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1874 and made a range of dental products including instruments, chairs and false teeth.
Length of box 170mm, width 90mm, depth 30mm.
What Does It Do?
Heated in hot water it becomes malleable, primarily being used as a form or mould, usually to make a dental prosthesis. However, in plastic surgery it was often used to keep open difficult cavity wounds, like the eye socket (orbit) or other challenging and mobile wounds such as the eyelids. In these situations, sutures would be tied over a Gutta Percha wound mould to fix or immobilise the graft and enabling it to “take”.
Examples of its use can be seen in the Dickie Orpen diagrams on this page.
Significance To Plastic Surgery
Gutta Percha has well known electrical insulation properties and was used as an outer sheath covering for the early undersea telegraph cables. In medical use however, the material shrank upon cooling and when pulled out of cavities being prepared for a prosthesis, could deform.
Charles Thomas Stent, a 19th century Dentist to the royal household modified the Gutta Percha base by adding palmitic, stearic and oleic acids thereby improving its ability to be moulded. He also added talc to bulk it out and by mixing in pigment produced its distinctively red colour. Thus, was born his eponymous “Stent’s Compound”. “Stent” effectively replaced Gutta Percha in clinical use.
In his 1920 book “Plastic Surgery of the Face” Gillies credited Esser with its first use as a mould known as a “Stent”. Today bolsters of moistened cotton wool are more commonly used to secure skin grafts into difficult cavity wounds.
Stent’s name was in many ways fortuitous, although not thought to be derived from the noun “stent”. This had been in use since the 14th century to mean the “staking out of fishing nets on a river” or stiffening of clothing (Roguin, A. Cardiovascular Interventions. Vol 4, No.2). Only in 1954 was the term first used to refer to an internal tube-like splint, initially to support the skin graft reconstruction of an experimental biliary tube in dogs. From there its use spread to urology, describing