Robert Tuttle Morris - Antisepsis Enters

Antisepsis Enters

In his book Fifty Years; A Surgeon he gives a clear and complete description of hospital conditions at that time before the entrance of antisepsis in the world of surgery as a normal and necessary routine.

Surgeons today with their sterilized gowns, caps and face masks, ribbed gloves, sterile gauze in place of sponges, and rigid rules against touching an unsterilized object in the room, cannot at all picture the days when such things were new.

So then at some point the Bellevue had to make some changes, due to the fact that Lister theories about the antisepsis had been accepted in the world of medicine. In the Surgical Division an extremely rapid change in method took place, so that the antiseptic surgery had changed the whole appearance of wards in the hospital. Morris was one of the main supporter of the new method enounced by Lister, and later on, of the new theories about asepsis, introduced by Dr. Ernst von Bergmann in 1892.

Soon other discoveries in the field of Medicine made techniques to advance. In 1884 Morris was a member of the audience in Berlin when Karl Koller gave his first public demonstration of cocaine as a local anesthetic in eye work. Later on in the United States this experimentation will see his leader in the figure of Dr. William Stewart Halsted. So then anesthetics started to be used regularly during surgical operations.