The history of varicocele: from antiquity to the modern ERA

ABSTRACT Men have most likely been affected by varicocele since the assumption of the upright position. In De Medicina, written during the first century AD, Celsus credits the Greeks with the first description of a varicocele, and he recorded his own acute observation: “The veins are swollen and twisted over the testicle, which becomes smaller”. Celsus himself is credited with the distinction between varicocele (dilation of surface veins) and “cirsocele” (dilation of deep veins). There has been a long history of treatment attempts and failures, some of which are remarkably strange, tha...