Among you interventionalists out there, there must be a few etymologists!
In an article entitled ''Impressions of Charles Stent,'' Mulliken and Goldwyn wrote that ''stent'' is an operating room byword, associated principally with skin graft fixation. The 19th-century English dentist, Charles Stent, has suffered the curious fate of having his name remembered but his life forgotten [1].
Charles Thomas Stent (1807-1885) improved the material for dental impressions from the unsatisfactory gutta percha (gum from the Palaquium gutta tree) by adding stearine and talc. Stent's compound later achieved fame in plastic surgery when used as an epidermic inlay for the facially disfigured, by J.F.S. Esser and the English plastic surgeon H. Gillies. In 1978, Stent's compound was still available, with kauri gum replacing the gutta percha and red pigments added. Mulliken's article thankfully ends with ''The word 'stent' is now a generic one not requiring a capital S. . . .''
The earliest article available to me relating to vascular stents was published by the eccentric pioneer of angioplasty, Charles T. Dotter, when he reported the unsuccessful use of plastic tube grafts in the canine femoral artery, and marginal success with coilspring tubular prostheses (O.D. 5 0.149 stainless steel wire, 1 cm in length) [2]. The word stent does not appear in this article.