In this age of coronavirus, personal protective equipment or PPE has become ubiquitous.

With our masks and gloves, we all look like surgeons every time we go to the grocery store now.

But however obvious it seems today that protective gear can help stop infections, that hasn't

always been the case.

Historically, even simple measures like wearing gloves were met with

fierce resistance. So today we're going to look at the origins of the first PPE,

rubber gloves during surgery.

Although textbooks usually give credit here to a famous surgeon,

those textbooks are wrong.

The real innovators here were the surgeon's long forgotten female nurses

plus a surgical resident. In fact every time a doctor or nurse snaps on gloves today

for a medical exam.

Or even every time you see a bus driver or grocery store clerk do the same.

You can say a silent thank you to Carolyn Hampton and Joseph Bloodgood.

Hi, I'm Sam Keene, and you're listening to the disappearing spoon a topsy-turvy

sciencey history podcast where footnotes become the real story.

Surgeons in the mid-1800s were pretty revolting, frankly. They often prided themselves and wearing the same blood-stained

overcoat from patient to patient, sometimes for years at a time. Some coats were so stiff with blood and pus that you could

practically stand them up in the corner by themselves. And of course, in

moving from patient to patient while dripping with blood.

Surgeons also carried infections from patient to patient.

Little wonder then that the death rate for surgeries in the mid-1800s

...