Peripheral Vascular Access in Children – Current Concepts

Vascular access has been an important component of medical therapy for patients throughout the history of medicine. The first documented intravenous (IV) therapy attempt was in 1492 by a doctor caring for Pope Innocent VIII in Rome, followed by IV experiments with opium on dogs at Oxford University in the seventeenth century [1]. However, it wasn’t until the cholera outbreak that technology for IV therapy developed from the works of Dr. Thomas Latta, which was further developed in the 1930s by Hirschfeld, Hyman, and Wanger with the invention of the micro-dripper. The use of vascular access for IV therapy was further solidified and made available to the public in the 1950s with the invention of the plastic catheter we use daily by the Mayo Clinic [1].