Is it really Leonardo’s triangle

“In polite conversation, as in surgery the knife must be used with great care…”

Andre Maurois

One of the favourite operations of General Surgery is to remove the gallbladder, a cholecystectomy. Great care must be taken to correctly identify and divide the cystic (gallbladder ) duct and not the conjoined vital biliary (liver) duct. In practice it is pretty simple to get right, but also surprisingly simple to get wrong. The key strategy is to dissect or clear the little space where the two ducts meet. In 2024 the phrase obtaining the critical view of safety is trendy. A decade or so earlier it was dissecting the hepatocystic triangle. Last century when I trained, we cleared Calot’s triangle, honouring the prominent 19th century French surgeon Jean-Francois Calot. However the first depiction of this key anatomical relationship comes from the 500 year old sketch books of Leonardo DaVinci. It was remarkable as the existence of the gallbladder was essentially overlooked, its function was obscure and its role in disease unconsidered. The concept that somebody might try to remove it was unimaginable. Or was it? #maybeheimaginedit #letsmakelemonade