Frederic Eugene Basil Foley

Dr. Frederic Eugene Basil Foley, MD (April 5, 1891 – March 24, 1966) was an American urologist who designed the Foley catheter.

Biography Frederic Foley was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1891. He studied languages at Yale University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1914, and then trained in medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine until his graduation in 1918. He subsequently worked with William Halsted and Harvey Cushing, and worked at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston on the junior surgical staff.

Although there is no record of his training in urology, he was certified by the American Board of Urology in 1937. Foley worked as a urologist in Boston, Massachusetts and later became chief of urology at Ancker Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Ancker Hospital was renamed St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center and is now known as Regions Hospital.) He died in 1966 of lung cancer. He worked on development of this design for use as an indwelling urinary catheter, to provide continuous drainage of the bladder, in the 1930s. His design incorporated an inflatable balloon towards the tip of the tube which could be inflated inside the bladder to retain the catheter without external taping or strapping. He demonstrated this to the American Urologists Society in 1935, and published a paper describing it in 1937.

While he was still developing his catheter, a patent was issued to Paul Raiche of the Davol Rubber Company of Providence, Rhode Island in 1936. He also invented a hydraulic operating table and a rotatable resectoscope, and described the first artificial urethral sphincter.