The Patient Who Devised His Own Silver Catheter: Keyvan Bey and His Bladder Stone

The Ottoman Empire, late fifteenth century. Ahi Çelebi, chief physician to three sultans, records in his treatise on stones of the kidneys and bladder (1487-1488) the case of a patient he calls Amir Ali Keyvan Bey. A stone had lodged in his bladder and he could pass only two or three drops of urine, with difficulty. The doctors suggested massage, dressings, diuretics and even an incision. Nothing helped. So he devised a slender silver tube, narrower at one end and pierced with holes "like a flute". When he felt the urge to urinate, he passed it through the urethra, pushed the stone back and the urine flowed out through the holes. Later he wanted to be rid of the problem altogether: he made a pair of steel pincers, passed them into the bladder and, according to the account, crushed the stone into pieces and was able to urinate.

What do we know for certain? Only what the treatise says. We have not read the Ottoman manuscript ourselves: we know the account through the study by the medical historian Nil Sarı (2021), who analyses it folio by folio. No other source confirms the outcome, and the instruments have not survived. That is why, in the video, Keyvan says "according to the account" and "the treatise says", and why the tube and the pincers shown in the animations are our own hypothesis, not a reconstruction of real objects. No portrait of him exists either. The video condenses the story: the doctors and their remedies do not appear.

Today most bladder stones are treated by the same route Keyvan Bey chose: through the urethra, with no incision. With an endoscope and a laser, the stone is broken up under direct vision and the fragments are removed. We also look for the cause, which in adult men is usually a prostate that prevents the bladder from emptying properly and can often be treated in the same operation.