I am on a list for legal nurses and we got talking about why some gadget or other was called what it was called (in the context of OR documentation-- what really happened/was the stuff being used appropriate).
As conversations do, we wandered off into other like objects, and I got wondering what other gadgets you have or use that you don't know or wondered about.
Here's some excerpts from our conversation to get you started:
One of the hospitals I worked at called lap sponges Mik. For the life of me I could not figure out why till I googled it and found out the xray loop was designed by a guy named Mikinopolos.
Another anomaly I discovered when working in hospitals in different countries, is that surgeons may call sponges various names depending on what those were called where they trained (this is also true of instruments). So perhaps the surgeon in your case trained at the Mayo Clinic.
This reminded me of when I worked at Stanford 40 (!) years ago. Tom Fogerty, of Fogerty catheter fame, had been one of the late, great Norman Shumway's residents and earned Norman's disdain for going out into (very lucrative) private practice, in fact as the only private cardiac surg team at Stanford. In those years, residents in the two Stanford academic cardiac surg teams were not allowed to ask for a "Fogerty catheter" in the OR or cath lab, being sternly instructed to ask only for "balloon-tipped catheters."
