Antiseptic practice in surgery

Greek medicine used wine and vinegar in wound dressing. Alcohol gained favor and around 1820 iodine became popular in France for treating wounds.

Charles White (1728-1813) of Manchester emphasized the importance of cleanliness in obstetrical practice while Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), in a paper On the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever in 1843, argued that women in labor should not be treated by a doctor who had recently conducted an autopsy or how had treated a patient with puerperal fever.

Germ-theory first came to the attention of medical practitioners in the controversies over antiseptic surgery that began in Britain in the late 1860s. Joseph Lister accepted Louis Pasteur’s notion that microorganisms were involved in suppuration and began developing the elements of antiseptic wound management in 1865.

Joseph Lister

By the end of the decade, Lister has created an elaborate surgical protocol incorporating antiseptic sprays and dressings, particularly of carbolic acid.

As early as 1874, Pasteur had suggested placing the instruments in boiling water and passing them through a flame; heat sterilization of instruments was accepted by Robert Koch in 1881.

Primed with the science of bacteriology and knowledge of Pasteur and Koch’s laboratory autoclaves surgical heat sterilization emerged in France and Germany between 1883 and 1893.

Neuber of Kiel was probably the first to autoclave operating gowns in 1883 and then advocate sterile caps and rubber shows in 1886.

In 1867, Lister published Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Medicine. Within five years, surgeons using Lister’s antiseptic techniques were able to reduce the surgical mortality rate from nearly 60 percent all the way down to 4 percent. By the time Lister retired in 1892, antiseptic surgery had established itself.
Antiseptic practice in surgery

Leprosy in modern history

Leprosy is also known as Hansen’s disease or neurodermatitis and is caused by a rod-shaped bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, that is spread in droplets of nasal mucus.

According to historical and archeological evidence leprosy was first spread to the Middle East in the days of Alexander the Great, during the years 324-325 BC, and was not known before.

The Greek word lepra was most likely used to mean a variety of severe skin diseases. Greek medical writings later than the third century BC provide the earliest clinical references to modern leprosy.

In medieval Europe, leprosy patients had to carry a ‘clapper’ to warn others that a person with leprosy was approaching. Even as late as 1913, state Senator G.E Willet of Montana was forced to give up his seat after he was diagnosed with leprosy.

In the 1870s, Armauer Hansen discovered microbe that causes the affliction and treatments were eventually developed. A prominent dermatologist in Norway, Daniel Cornelius Danielsen, wrote the first extensive description of leop0rsy, it was this description that Hansen used 20 year later as the basis for his studies of leprosy.

In the 1980s, a set of drugs was discovered that together can stop the progress of the disease. Today, 75% of all cases of leprosy occur in South East Asia, primarily in India.
Leprosy in modern history

Microscopic Organisms

Several experimenters with microscope discovered new findings, including Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who was the first to describe the cellular structure of plants.

In 1665, Hooke published his book Micrographia, a series of illustrations and description and of his observations using new and improved microscopes.

However, Anton von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a Dutch lensmaker, pioneered in the field, achieving much greater magnifications than others. Over the more than fifty years following 1672 until his death, he described and draws illustrations of his findings.

Leeuwenhoek made his simple microscope in the 1670s. He used to look at rain water, soil, body fluids and other materials.

He described bacteria, sperm, protozoa and red corpuscle of blood. He describes the mouthparts of insects and the stricture of plants.

What he saw shocked him. In a drop of water small creatures swimming around, organisms so small no one knew they existed.

Leeuwenhoek’s microscope consisted of a single lenses, some extremely small. His discovery of protozoa and sperm cells, which he called animacules, contributed to a controversy between ovists and animaculist that lasted through of the 18th century.

Animacules which is termed by Leeuwenhoek today is known microorganisms or microbes.

The study of the microscopic details of life languished was due to the poor quality of 17th and 18th century microscopes.

Leeuwenhoek’s handmade lenses were far better than any other in existence and can magnify the objects 300 times.
Microscopic Organisms