Each entry gives the claim as it is usually repeated, why it persists, what the evidence shows, and a verdict. 68 are tied to the moment in the film where the subject comes up, with a Watch link; the other 18 are repeated errors the film's research found in the literature.
Tied to a moment in the film
Prologue: A Stone in a Jar
The El Amrah stone dates from 4800 BC, or is more than 7,000 years old.
Verdict: Outdated.
Why it persists
The figures appear in respected sources (EAU History Office, BAUS, Riches 1967) and were reasonable on the chronology of their time.
The evidence
Radiocarbon modelling now places the start of the predynastic Naqada culture at about 3800 to 3700 BC. The grave is predynastic, but no phase or direct date has been established for it.
The stone came from the mummy of a teenage boy known as 'El-Amrah', found in northern Egypt.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
Museum newsletters and society pages compress the story, and a place name is easily read as a personal name.
The evidence
El Amrah is the cemetery, not the boy. Elliot Smith found a skeleton in a predynastic grave, not a mummy, and the site lies in Upper (southern) Egypt, near Abydos.
The ancient Egyptians drew off urine through hollow reeds, or through bronze or gold tubes.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
The story is repeated across urology review articles, often with a date such as 3000 BC or 1500 BC, and a general encyclopaedia summary repeats it without a primary citation. A plausible image passes from one review to the next.
The evidence
No source read for the film documents a catheter in any medical papyrus, and no Egyptian object has been securely identified as a catheter. The earliest secure catheters in the film's sources are Roman: Celsus's bronze tubes and a bronze male catheter found at Pompeii.
Ancient perineal lithotomy killed a known percentage of patients.
Verdict: No data.
Why it persists
Mortality figures from later centuries are projected back onto antiquity.
The evidence
No case numbers survive from antiquity. The Sushruta Samhita says only that death is almost certain without operation and the result uncertain with it; Celsus gives no figures.
The Hippocratic Oath forbade doctors to do surgery.
Verdict: Unproven.
Why it persists
Jones's widely used 1923 translation reads the clause as a renunciation of the knife.
The evidence
The clause concerns cutting for the stone. Adams's translation limits it to that operation; Jones's makes it wider. Which reading is right is unsettled.
Catheters were found in the House of the Surgeon at Pompeii.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
The house is famous for its instruments, and a catheter from Pompeii is well known.
The evidence
The instruments listed from the house (scalpels, spatulae, hooks, bleeding cups, forceps) do not include catheters. A bronze male catheter is known from Pompeii, via a 1903 cast, but not from that house in the sources read.
Celsus's account is detailed and Roman bronze examples survive, so the earliest good description is taken for the first use.
The evidence
Celsus gives the earliest detailed description in the film's sources. Earlier Greek and Egyptian use is claimed but not established in the kit, and an earlier invention cannot be excluded.
Galen did prove that the kidneys make urine, and the later filtration theory is read back into his work.
The evidence
Galen explicitly rejected the sieve model (On the Natural Faculties I.15). He held that the kidney draws the watery part of the blood by an attractive faculty, as a lodestone draws iron (I.14).
An encyclopaedia article says so, and his verse De urinis was a standard teaching text for centuries, so his name is tied to the flask.
The evidence
No primary support was found. Byzantine authors such as Actuarius also recommended a clear, bladder-shaped vessel, the matula was the physician's emblem across Europe, and nothing in the sources read ties its origin to Gilles. What can be said is that Gilles's poem of 352 verses, written as a memory aid for students, made the flask a classroom subject.
Theophilus invented the test for albumin in urine.
Verdict: Overstated.
Why it persists
Two modern accounts say he warmed urine and saw cloudiness or thick material, and that observation is read back as a protein test.
The evidence
The warming is reported only in secondary sources and is graded probable. The chemistry of coagulable urine belongs to later workers: Dekkers in the late 17th century, Cotugno in 1764 and Bright in 1827. What Theophilus verifiably did was define urine as the filtrate of the blood and arrange its colours from white to black. The safe wording is that he noticed cloudiness on warming.
Urine charts always showed twenty colours, and colour was the whole of uroscopy.
Verdict: Oversimplified.
Why it persists
The ring of twenty flasks in manuscripts and in the printed Fasciculus medicinae is the best-known image of uroscopy.
The evidence
Charts show 20 or 21 flasks depending on the source and edition: the Savile 39 wheel has 20, Montagnana's printed chart of 1487 has 21, and descriptions of the Fasciculus wheel differ. The texts also read consistency, quantity, sediment, froth and smell, and sometimes taste.
Albucasis invented lithotripsy and was the first to remove a bladder stone with forceps.
Verdict: Unsupported as priority claims.
Why it persists
Modern tributes to al-Zahrawi often present his instruments as firsts.
The evidence
What is documented is a drill for stones lodged in the urethra and forceps used to crush a large stone in the bladder before extraction. The priority claims are modern tributes, not verified findings.
Willis wrote that diabetic urine was 'wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with honey or sugar'.
Verdict: Misquotation.
Why it persists
The line is widely quoted in histories of diabetes.
The evidence
No edition with that English wording was found. The 1685 English text of Willis reads 'wonderfully sweet, as though Honey were mixt in it', which is what the film quotes. The popular line is best taken as a modern rendering of his Latin.
Matthew Dobson showed sugar in diabetic urine in 1772.
Verdict: Half true.
Why it persists
His patient was admitted in 1772, and some histories give that year for the discovery.
The evidence
The patient, a man of 33 passing 28 pints a day, entered Liverpool Infirmary in 1772; Dobson published the experiments in 1776 in Medical Observations and Inquiries. Both years are right for different things.
Thomas Willis coined the term 'diabetes mellitus'.
Verdict: Disputed; not found in Willis.
Why it persists
Willis's honey-sweet urine is the best-known early description of the sweet form, so the Latin name is credited to him, and one popular history says he added it.
The evidence
Secondary sources disagree: the encyclopaedia history of diabetes says Willis did not add 'mellitus', Fitzharris says he did. What his texts verifiably contain is the observation that diabetic urine is wonderfully sweet (Latin 1679, English 1685) and the view that diabetes is a disease of the blood rather than the kidneys.
Sources
Wikipedia: History of diabetes (listed in research/02 §11) Secondary
Fitzharris, as cited in research/02 §7 item 6 (full reference not given in the kit) Secondary
The date circulates in secondary accounts; the research brief for the film itself used it.
The evidence
The observation is in Cotugno's De ischiade nervosa commentarius, a book on sciatica printed at Naples in 1764 (one source gives 1765). It concerns a soldier of 28 with dropsy whose heated urine formed a dense white body like egg albumen. 1770 is not supported.
Wöhler's synthesis of urea in 1828 killed the doctrine of vitalism.
Verdict: False as usually told.
Why it persists
It gives organic chemistry a clean founding story. Hermann Kopp and later writers recast Wöhler as a campaigner, and a survey published in 2000 found that about nine in ten chemistry textbooks repeat some version of the claim.
The evidence
The synthesis is well documented; its effect on vitalism is not. Belief in a vital force persisted for decades, Kolbe's work of 1845 is often cited as more decisive, and Homer Smith's kidney studies of the 1930s were later described as removing the last trace of vitalism from physiology. Wöhler's letter to Berzelius announces urea without kidneys; it is the later retelling that turns this into the end of vitalism.
Heidenhain demonstrated tubular secretion with methylene blue.
Verdict: Probably wrong dye.
Why it persists
An encyclopaedia article on the Bowman-Heidenhain hypothesis names that dye.
The evidence
Most accounts, including a 2018 review, name indigo carmine (sodium sulfindigotate), injected into rabbits whose blood pressure had been lowered so that filtration should cease. The exact set-up was not confirmed in a primary source.
Carl Ludwig published his filtration theory in 1844.
Verdict: Disputed; 1843 better supported.
Why it persists
The year is widely repeated, including in part of the film's own research, and may refer to a later handbook article.
The evidence
Ludwig's Beiträge zur Lehre vom Mechanismus der Harnsecretion was published at Marburg in 1843, after lectures in 1842 to 1843. The film follows 1843: 'the very next year' after Bowman.
Sources
historyofmedicine.com (Garrison-Morton derived) entry on Carl Ludwig, Beiträge zur Lehre vom Mechanismus der Harnsecretion, Marburg, N. G. Elwert, 1843 Secondary
Wearn and Richards proved glomerular filtration beyond doubt in 1924.
Verdict: Overstated.
Why it persists
Theirs was the first direct sample of glomerular fluid, and it is remembered as the end of the quarrel.
The evidence
Their colleague Carl Schmidt wrote that it gave the first direct evidence of tubular reabsorption, which suggests, though it does not prove, glomerular filtration. The objection that a frog is not a mammal, raised in December 1921, was met by later work: inulin clearance in man in 1935 and mammalian micropuncture from 1941. The film keeps Schmidt's caution.
Shannon JA, Smith HW. The excretion of inulin, xylose and urea by normal and phlorizinized man. J Clin Invest 1935;14(4):393-401. doi:10.1172/jci100690 Primary
Hard water caused the bladder stones of Norwich and Norfolk.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
Water was a common explanation for stone at the time, and a single local cause makes a tidy story for a regional disease.
The evidence
No source in the kit supports hard water. Batty Shaw found that those who studied the Norwich cases could not solve the cause, and that the evidence points to diet in the first years of life. The link to infant diet comes from twentieth-century comparison with endemic areas in Thailand, India and Pakistan, and the mechanism remains a hypothesis.
Franco wrote, in so many words, "I do not counsel any man to do the like".
Verdict: Half true: the sense is right, the quotation is unverified.
Why it persists
An English line of this kind circulates in histories of the high operation, and a memorable sentence is easier to repeat than a paraphrase.
The evidence
The substance is well supported: Franco credited luck and did not recommend the operation (EAU, Riches, French Wikipedia). The exact words could not be checked against his text; only the front matter of Nicaise's 1895 edition was reachable. Neither the film nor this site puts them in quotation marks.
Frère Jacques's Paris series is known exactly: 25 deaths in 60 patients (or, in another telling, 53.5 per cent of 71).
Verdict: Overstated: the figures vary.
Why it persists
Precise numbers sound authoritative, and each version is repeated by sources that copy one another.
The evidence
Two incompatible versions exist: 60 cut with 25 deaths, 13 cured and 22 crippled (BAUS, EAU, Goddard), and 71 operated in one month with 53.5 per cent mortality (Ganem and Carson). Neither was checked against a hospital register.
The nursery round "Frère Jacques" was written about the lithotomist Jacques Beaulieu.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
The names match, the lithotomist was famous and odd, and a link between a gruesome trade and a children's song makes a good story. It is repeated in urology lectures and popular histories.
The evidence
Ganem and Carson (1999) looked for a connection and found none. The tune's earliest known source is a French manuscript of about 1780 (estimated 1775 to 1785), decades after Beaulieu died, where it is called "Frère Blaise". It was first printed in 1811, and words and music appear together in Paris in 1869. One musicologist has proposed Rameau as its composer. Ganem and Carson themselves call the tune a 17th-century harpsichord piece by an unknown author, so the date of the melody is also disputed; the verdict on the link to Beaulieu stands either way.
Cheselden's lateral lithotomy carried a mortality of about 50 per cent in his hands.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
The figure appears on the BAUS museum page and in English Wikipedia, and high mortality fits the general picture of pre-anaesthetic surgery.
The evidence
Cheselden published his own series (1740 and 1741 editions): 213 patients at St Thomas's with 20 deaths, about 9.4 per cent, and 3 deaths among 105 children aged ten or under. The James Lind Library reproduces his age table. The 50 per cent figure contradicts the primary source.
His 1752 letter is well known and describes the device in his own words, and Franklin is widely remembered as an inventor.
The evidence
The editors of the Franklin Papers note that the letter gives a false impression of invention. Flexible catheters of this type were already in use elsewhere; Francesco Roncalli-Parolino had made one about 1720 from a twisted spiral of silver covered with silk. Franklin designed and had one made for his brother; he was not the first.
Civiale's first lithotrity on a living patient has one agreed date.
Verdict: Overstated: most sources say January 1824.
Why it persists
Dates are copied from one museum page to the next without comparison.
The evidence
Riches and BAUS give January 1824 (BAUS: 13 January 1824); the EAU page on the Civiale set gives 23 January 1823. Civiale's report to the Académie on 22 March 1824 makes 1824 more likely.
Civiale's comparison is known exactly, for example 1,141 deaths in 5,715 lithotomies against 6 in 257 lithotrities.
Verdict: Overstated: only the ratios are safe.
Why it persists
Herr's 2009 figures are widely cited, and exact numbers look like settled data.
The evidence
At least three versions circulate (Herr 2009; Belinaye 1837 as cited by Mazur 2014; English Wikipedia), differing in both series. The kit did not read the 1835 original. All agree on roughly one in five against one in forty to fifty.
Sources
H. W. Herr, Civiale, stones and statistics: the dawn of evidence-based medicine, BJU Int 2009;104(3):300-302 Secondary
Mazur 2014, citing Belinaye 1837 (figures for Civiale's comparison) Secondary
English Wikipedia, figures for Civiale's lithotomy and lithotrity comparison Secondary
The Lichtleiter was made of silver covered with sharkskin (or, in other accounts, lead covered with leather).
Verdict: Unresolved.
Why it persists
Each account states its version as fact, and a striking material is easy to repeat.
The evidence
Three sources disagree: the EAU says hollow lead covered with leather; the Endourology Society says sheet metal covered by paper and leather; Wallace (1973) says silver protected with sharkskin. No single material should be stated as fact. The film draws a dark leather-covered vase but the narration names no material.
The University faculty's dismissal is the memorable part of the story, and the 1876 ADB entry says the Josephinum rejected it too.
The evidence
Vienna gave two verdicts. The Josephinum, the military medico-surgical academy, tested the instrument on a cadaver on 9 December 1806, found it fully met expectations, praised it and built an improved model within two months. The University medical faculty, the academy's rival, rejected it.
The Vienna faculty dismissed the Lichtleiter as 'a magic lantern in the human body'.
Verdict: Unsupported as a quotation.
Why it persists
The phrase is vivid, it is printed in a standard national biography, and it is repeated without its date.
The evidence
The phrase first appears in Wilhelm Stricker's ADB entry of 1876, 67 years after Bozzini's death, with no document cited, in an account that also gets the Josephinum's verdict wrong. The wordings that rest on Viennese archival research are 'a mere toy' or 'a mere plaything'. The film attributes the lantern phrase to 'a biographer, writing long afterwards'.
1865 is the date of his book, which is the most cited work.
The evidence
He showed the instrument in 1853: on 29 November in his own account, on 20 July in other sources. The 1865 book and its 1867 English translation describe an instrument already in use.
Nitze was the first to put electric light inside the body.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
His cystoscope is the best-known early instrument with a distal electric light.
The evidence
Julius Bruck of Breslau used a water-cooled platinum lamp in 1867 to light the mouth and, from the rectum, the bladder; a French maker, Trouvé, also made claims. Nitze's step was to combine a light at the tip with a lens telescope in a catheter-sized shaft.
One museum page gives the date, probably confusing the bulb with the year it reached cystoscopes.
The evidence
Edison's lamp patent was filed in 1879 and granted in January 1880. 1886-1887 is when incandescent lamps were fitted to cystoscopes in Vienna and Berlin.
Nitze's 1879 cystoscope was lit by Edison's light bulb.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
The cystoscope and the incandescent bulb arrived within months of each other, and later lamp cystoscopes did use bulbs.
The evidence
The 1879 instrument used a platinum wire made white-hot by current and cooled by iced water. Edison filed his lamp patent on 4 November 1879, six months after the Vienna demonstration. Bulbs entered cystoscopes in 1886-1887.
Young's 1912 cystoscope reached the renal pelvis of a child of stated age, and the case was published at once.
Verdict: Embellished.
Why it persists
The case is a satisfying first, and later retellings add detail.
The evidence
The core rests on Bagley's history: a rigid paediatric cystoscope passed up a severely dilated ureter in a child with posterior urethral valves in 1912, reported only in 1929 in a review of congenital valves. The child's age and any passage to the renal pelvis or calyces are not verified in dossier 04, although dossier 03 repeats the pelvis detail from a 2018 review.
On seeing the X-ray of her hand, Anna Bertha Röntgen exclaimed, 'I have seen my death!'
Verdict: Legend.
Why it persists
The line is dramatic and attaches to a real radiograph.
The evidence
Röntgen did radiograph his wife's hand about six weeks after the discovery. The exclamation is widely repeated but anecdotal. The film shows the bones of a hand and does not repeat the line.
Sources
English Wikipedia entry on Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, as cited in dossier 04 §6.1 (no URL given in the kit) Secondary
Swick alone invented Uroselectan; or, von Lichtenberg invented intravenous urography.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
Each version tells the story through one name: the wronged young discoverer, or the professor who presented the work.
The evidence
The chemists Binz and Räth made the compounds as anti-infectives. Swick discovered their use for urography and helped modify the agent. Von Lichtenberg's clinic carried the clinical series, and his presentations took the public credit.
Hopkins invented fibre optics single-handed, including glass cladding in 1951.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
Hopkins is the best-known name in medical optics, and Wallace (1973) credited him with cladding.
The evidence
Lamm made a crude fibre bundle in 1930; van Heel published in the same issue of Nature as Hopkins and Kapany in 1954; glass cladding came from van Heel's idea and Curtiss's glass-clad fibre.
Herophilus was a famous early anatomist working in Greek, and the gland's name is Greek, so the attribution is easy to repeat from one history to the next.
The evidence
His term, known through Galen, was 'glandular assistants', which may refer to the seminal vesicles. The modern word was coined and popularised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after Massa's description of 1536.
The two words differ by one letter, and 'prostrate' is the more familiar English word.
The evidence
The name comes from the Greek prostates, 'one standing in front', after the gland's position before the bladder outlet. 'Prostrate' means lying face down.
Huggins's 1941 work proved that testosterone causes prostate cancer.
Verdict: Overstated.
Why it persists
The finding that castration slowed advanced cancer was turned, by extension, into a rule that testosterone feeds any prostate cancer.
The evidence
The 1941 studies showed that established metastatic cancer depends on androgen. The androgen-injection arm was tiny, three men with results for two; Morgentaler argues the fear rested in effect on one untreated man given testosterone for 18 days.
PSA rises with cancer and is used in screening, so it is spoken of as a cancer test.
The evidence
PSA is specific to the prostate, not to cancer. Stamey's founding paper (1987) found it raised in 86% of men with benign enlargement and concluded that neither PSA nor acid phosphatase is specific.
Joseph Murray performed the first successful kidney transplant on his own.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
Murray received the Nobel Prize for the work.
The evidence
The urologist J. Hartwell Harrison removed the donor kidney, Murray placed it, and John Merrill's nephrology team prepared the recipient with dialysis.
Lithotripsy began with a single discovery in 1966, when raindrop damage to a jet revealed that shock waves could break stones.
Verdict: Conflated.
Why it persists
Two good stories are easier to tell as one.
The evidence
There were two separate threads: Dornier's research on erosion of aircraft by raindrops and micrometeorites, and an engineer's electric-shock-like sensation on touching the apparatus. Only the second is dated to 1966, by secondary sources; the pioneers' own chronology gives no year.
Below Kass's threshold of 100,000 bacteria per millilitre, urine is sterile.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
A number used every day to report cultures came to stand for the presence or absence of bacteria.
The evidence
Kass set the threshold to separate true infection from contamination of a voided sample. It was never a test of sterility, and the standard culture behind it detects only 1,000 or more colony-forming units per millilitre.
Routine culture of a thousandth of a millilitre, in air, for a day, reported 'no growth' for most healthy bladders, and the absence of growth was taken as the absence of bacteria. Kass's threshold for infection was read as a line between sterile and infected.
The evidence
In 2012 Wolfe and colleagues found bacterial DNA in urine taken directly from the bladder. In 2014 Hilt and colleagues grew bacteria from 80% of catheter samples using a hundred times the volume, several atmospheres and longer incubation; 92% of those had been reported as no growth.
A famous physician, asked to judge a patient's urine, told the messenger to bring the patient's shoe instead.
Verdict: Apocryphal.
Why it persists
The quip mocks uroscopy neatly and circulates in popular histories under more than one name.
The evidence
The line is credited to Linacre and also to John Radcliffe, and no source was found for either. A saying with two owners and no source is best treated as apocryphal.
A Jerusalem Code of 1090 fined physicians who failed to examine the urine.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
It appears in a popular history of uroscopy and is repeated without a primary citation.
The evidence
No source for such a code was found. The film's research judged the date inconsistent with the chronology of the crusader kingdom and suggested a garbled reference to the later Assizes of Jerusalem, but that chronology was not itself checked against a source.
Thomas Linacre, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, passed a statute forbidding diagnosis from urine alone, sometimes dated 1555.
Verdict: Unsupported as stated.
Why it persists
Linacre's name is attached to the College's early rules, and one web account joins his name to a 1555 date.
The evidence
No statute text was found in either form. Linacre died in 1524, so a 1555 ruling cannot be his; John Caius, who kept the College Annals from 1555, fits that date better. See the debate on the College statute.
Uroscopy began some six thousand years ago in Babylon.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
A long pedigree is attractive in introductions to the subject, and the figure is repeated without a source.
The evidence
The claim is weakly sourced. In the sources read for the film, the learned tradition of reading urine in a flask takes shape in late antiquity and Byzantium, with Theophilus in the seventh century.
Dekkers described urine that coagulates with heat in 1695.
Verdict: Date uncertain.
Why it persists
Three years appear in print, tied to a first edition, a second edition and a later citation, and most histories give only one of them.
The evidence
A listing derived from Garrison-Morton dates the first edition of his Exercitationes practicae to 1673, with the description in chapter V; other accounts give 1694; a 2008 urology history gives 1695. The Wellcome Collection holds a 1694 Leiden edition, a second edition about twice the size of the first, and a museum copy has a picture of a nephrotic patient facing the relevant page. The safe statement is 'late 17th century' or '1694'.
Pepys's bladder stone was the size of a tennis ball.
Verdict: Unsupported as a stated fact.
Why it persists
The comparison is vivid and is repeated in general reference works, sometimes as though it came from the diary.
The evidence
As far as the kit checked, the phrase is not in Pepys's diary. Hektoen gives about two inches across, and the diary's editor William Matthews disputed the tennis-ball comparison in 1970. Where it is used, the comparison is with a real-tennis ball, slightly smaller than a modern one.
Hektoen International, essay on Pepys's operation for stone Secondary
Wikipedia, Samuel Pepys (including its footnote on the autopsy) Secondary
VIII. Light
Bozzini was born in 1779 and died in 1807.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
The dates appear in a gynaecology journal article (CEOG) and can be copied from it.
The evidence
Two independent biographical sources give 1773 to 1809. He was alive to answer the Vienna faculty on 28 March 1807 and was appointed Physicus extraordinarius in Frankfurt on 19 May 1808.
Bozzini looked into the male bladder, so the first cystoscopy was his.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
The Lichtleiter is the ancestor of the cystoscope, and the female urethra and bladder are listed among its intended targets.
The evidence
No examination of a living male bladder is documented. The best-documented demonstrations on living patients were vaginal (at Halle), oral, nasal and pharyngeal.
The Vienna faculty reprimanded Bozzini for 'undue curiosity' (or 'morbid curiosity').
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
It appears in two secondary papers and fits a story of a pioneer punished by authority.
The evidence
The two papers give no primary source, and one of them has impossible dates for Bozzini. The documented record is a negative verdict on the instrument and Bozzini's published reply; no reprimand for curiosity has been traced.
A British soldier stole the original Lichtleiter from Vienna in 1945.
Verdict: Speculation.
Why it persists
A page in the American College of Surgeons archives suggests it, and it explains how the instrument reached Chicago.
The evidence
The Medical University of Vienna and the EAU both say the circumstances of its disappearance are unknown. It was later found at the American College of Surgeons in Chicago and returned to Vienna (2002 in most accounts, 2001 in one).
The first cystoscopy took place in 1807 at the Academy of Medicine in Vienna.
Verdict: Loose.
Why it persists
A museum page uses this wording, compressing the Vienna trials into a single first.
The evidence
The Josephinum was a military medico-surgical academy, not an academy of medicine; the instrument arrived in November 1806 and was demonstrated on a cadaver on 9 December 1806. The wording runs the two Vienna bodies and their dates together.
Basil Hirschowitz invented the flexible endoscope alone in 1957.
Verdict: False.
Why it persists
He demonstrated the instrument and is the name attached to it.
The evidence
The first practical fibre gastroscope was a team effort with Larry Curtiss and C. Wilbur Peters at the University of Michigan; it was shown in 1957 and published in 1958.
David Newman of Glasgow built the first incandescent-lamp cystoscope in 1883.
Verdict: Half true.
Why it persists
Newman did put the first incandescent bulb into a human bladder, and the two achievements are easily merged.
The evidence
On 18 January 1883 Newman passed a bulb on a long handle into a female bladder beside an open vulcanite speculum. The integrated lamp cystoscope with Nitze-type optics came from Leiter with Dittel and from Nitze with Hartwig in 1886-1887.
The complete specification and the US filing are both dated 1960.
The evidence
The first British application was filed on 16 July 1959; the complete specification followed on 15 July 1960, and the patent was published on 8 April 1964. The US application was filed on 14 July 1960.
Ablin is credited with discovering a prostate antigen in 1970 and became widely known as a critic of screening.
The evidence
The clinical assay came from the protein Wang purified in 1979 and its commercial development (first test 1986); Ablin's 1970 antigen is a claimed precursor in a disputed priority chain.
Pasteur proved that urine in the bladder is sterile.
Verdict: Unsupported.
Why it persists
Pasteur's experiments on putrefaction are often cited as the origin of the teaching.
The evidence
In 1863 Pasteur showed that fresh blood or urine kept in sterilised air does not putrefy. That did not sample the bladder, and the kit found no statement by him that bladder urine is sterile.