Word: patients
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...area to be cut was prepared for several days by "scrubbing and wrapping in bichloride solution or carbolic-soaked towels." Later on, the style was to scrub the patient off & on all day with green soap, then soak his skin the evening before the operation with a poultice of the soap. Finally, in the middle of the night, when he might have rested for the ordeal, he was "entertained" by being scrubbed, and the site of the operation was bathed in alcohol and dressed with a wet, sticky poultice to be kept on until the operation. Internal cleanliness was achieved...
After the operation the unlucky patient continued to starve. His room was kept dark, and no one approached the bed except when absolutely necessary for fear of shaking it, causing an artery or vein to become untied-"how, I do not know...
Surgeon, Old Style. From tail coats, surgeons progressed to shirt sleeves and rubber aprons, not to protect the patient but to protect the surgeon's clothes. One man wore longshoreman's boots, another "butcher's boots which he never cleaned." Only by gradual stages was the present top-to-toe sterile white achieved...
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...