Word: erdmann
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...Erdmann gives credit for the invention of rubber gloves to the late Dr. W. S. Halsted of Johns Hopkins, who thought them up to protect the hands of a pretty nurse he later married. The hand-washing then in vogue took the skin off doctors and nurses alike. Bichloride and carbonate of soda were used. "There was no question of the liberation of chlorine, nor was there any question of destruction of hands and laundry nor of the corrosion of plumbing." Surgeons worked in cotton gloves...
Equipment, Old Style. An operation in those days was often performed in a patient's house. The surgeon sent nurses ahead to prepare a room, the surgeon brought his instruments in a metal case to be sterilized on the stove, the family doctor gave the anesthetic. Dr. Erdmann once removed a large gallstone and an ovarian tumor from a large, 70-year-old woman in her home by the light of kerosene-burning auto lamps...
Anesthetics, Old Style. Anesthesia has progressed from chloroform to cyclopropane and local and spinal anesthesia. Dr. Erdmann remembers giving anesthetics for the afternoon clinics during his internship when "most of our patients were truck drivers, wharfmen and the like with strong whiskey, gin or tobacco breaths. We would clap a bootleg cone or a lamp-chimney cone over the face and push the anesthesia until the patient was deep blue...
...summer of 1893, when the country was in the midst of the free silver debate, President Cleveland secretly had a cancer removed from his upper left jaw. Dr. Erdmann went along. "The yacht Oneida, owned by the late E. C. Benedict, was anchored off the Battery landing. Under cover of darkness the President went aboard, followed by Dr. Joseph Bryant [the operating surgeon]. Major O'Reilly of the Army Medical Corps, a dentist and [three other doctors]. We sailed all night down Long Island Sound, anchored in Plum Gut, and the operation was performed the next morning...
...owes his popularity as a surgeon to the so-called Erdmann technique, which is not a technique at all, but an amazing speed in operating attained through practice, great anatomical knowledge and never-ending study. There is no Erdmann operation-the doctor never concentrated exclusively on any one area. He would as soon cut off a leg as go after an appendix, is at home in the skull and the thorax. He teaches surgery, but has never been able to teach the Erdmann technique...