HYGIENE

 

 

Josef Lister 1872 – 1912

British surgeon, whose discovery of antiseptics in 1865 greatly reduced the number of deaths due to operating-room infections. Lister began to study the coagulation of blood and the inflammation that followed injuries and surgical wounds. In 1861 he was appointed surgeon of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in a new surgery unit designed to reduce gangrene and other infections then thought to be caused by bad air. Despite his efforts to keep surgical instruments and rooms clean the mortality rate remained close to 50%.

 

Believing infection to be caused by airborne dust particles Lister sprayed the air with carbolic acid (now called phenol) a chemical that was then being used to treat foul-smelling sewers. In 1865 he came upon the germ theory of the French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur, whose experiments revealed that fermentation and putrefaction were caused by micro-organisms brought in contact with organic material. By applying carbolic acid to instruments and directly to wounds and dressings Lister reduced surgical mortality to 15% by 1869.

 

Lister's discoveries in antisepsis met initial resistance, but by the 1880’s they had become widely accepted. In 1897 he was made a baron by Queen Victoria, who had been his patient.

 

James lind 1716 – 1794

He was born in Scotland and studied medicine in Edinburgh. Then he joined the British Navy and served as ship surgeon until 1748. During his life he contributed considerably towards the hygiene on ships of the British Navy. His best known publication was that on scurvy as well as many other works dealing with the health and welfare of seamen. Lind emphasized the remedial properties of antiscorbutic items such as fresh citrus fruit and lemon juice in daily rations. He laid the foundation of naval hygiene in England.

 

Louis Jacques thénard 1777 – 1857

Thénard was a chemist. He studied potassium, arsenic, iodine, metal oxide, sulfur and ether with Josef Louis Gay-Lussac and discovered hydrogen peroxide H₂O₂ 

 

Hydrogen peroxide is a fluid with no color which contains a strong acid. It is used as an oxidizing agent, bleach and disinfectant.

 

 

Max von Pettenkofer 1818 – 1901

He studied philosophy and natural science, then went on to study medicine, becoming a physician in 1843. he conducted studies in biochemistry, discovering creatinine and demonstrating the existence of bile acid in urine.

 

His research interests ranged from the atmosphere, weather, underground water, drinking water, temperature, light, sewers and wastes to the burial of bodies.

 

Pettenkofer contributed to the establishment of hygiene as an independent division and to the basis of modern hygiene.

 

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis 1818 – 1865

Semmelweis is Hungarian obstetrician, who discovered how to prevent puerperal fever from being transmitted to mothers, thus introducing antiseptic prophylaxis into medicine. He became Assistant Professor in the maternity ward of the Vienna General Hospital. In the 1840’s puerperal or childbed fever, a bacterial infection of the female genital tract after childbirth, was taking the lives of up to 30% of the women giving birth in lying-in wards, whereas most women who gave birth at home remained relatively unaffected. Semmelweis noticed that women who were examined by student doctors who had not washed their hands after leaving the autopsy room had much higher mortality rates. When a colleague who had received a scalpel cut died from infection, Semmelweis concluded that the puerperal fever was septic and contagious. By ordering students to wash their hands with chlorinated lime before examining patients, he reduced the maternal mortality rate from 12.24 to 1.27% in two years.

 

Semmelweis nevertheless encountered strong opposition from hospital officials and because of his political activity as well he left Vienna in 1850 for the University of Pest, where he became Professor of Obstetrics at the university hospital. In spite of his enforcing antiseptic practices and reducing the mortality rate from puerperal fever to 0.85% Semmelweis's findings and publications were resisted by hospital and medical authorities in Hungary and abroad. After suffering a breakdown he went to a mental hospital in Vienna, where he died from an infection contracted during an operation he had performed earlier.

 

Quarantine is in international law name given to the regulations imposed by a country on the period of time during which a ship arriving in port is forbidden to land freight or passengers because it is suspected of being infected with a contagious disease. In municipal law the term is applied to the sanitary regulations of a state or municipality that restrict the spread of contagious diseases within its own boundaries.

 

Maritime quarantine regulations were first instituted by Venice in 1348, followed soon after by other Mediterranean cities and were directed against the invasion of pestilence from the East. Marseille established set rules in 1383, detaining anyone on an infected ship for 40 or quaranta, days; from this word arose the term quarantine.

 

In 1850 delegates from the principal countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea convened in Paris and adopted a code of international sanitary regulations. This code was later generally adopted by all countries and was enforced in their commercial relations with one another. Under its provisions, a ship leaving port is given a clean bill of health or a foul bill, depending upon whether the port from which the ship sails is free from or infected with a contagious disease. A suspected ship entering a port is at once placed under quarantine, the period varying in accordance with the severity of the suspected disease. In 1952 the World Health Organization (WHO), a United Nations (UN) agency, standardized this and other conventions in a code accepted by most countries; it also broadcasts relevant information to national health authorities and to ships at sea.