The Shocking Medical Histories Behind Everyday Objects

What do the red and white stripes on the barber’s pole have to do with blood letting? Where did 18th-century dentists find teeth to make dentures? What was the surprising original use of Listerine? And how did the hands of a doctor’s lover lead to the invention of rubber gloves? This talk explores everyday objects with shocking medical histories behind them.

Nobody's Hands Are Clean: A Cautionary Tale From Medical History

Today, we think of the hospital as paragons of sanitation. However, early Victorian hospitals were anything but. Surgeons rarely washed their hands or their instruments, and carried with them a cadaverous smell of rotting flesh which they cheerfully referred to as “good old hospital stink.” The stench was so offensive that the staff sometimes walked around with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses. In the midst of all this filth was a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis, who tried to implement a system of hand-washing in Vienna’s General Hospital in the 1840s. He was demonized by his colleagues for his efforts, and put into an insane asylum, where he died a lonely death.

Nowadays, the term “Semmelweis reflex” is used as a metaphor for the knee-jerk tendency to reject new evidence because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms. But Semmelweis’s story reminds us that we need to remain open to creative solutions that don’t necessarily chime with accepted methodologies. After all: what we believe to be true today is not necessarily what we will believe to be true tomorrow.

Plastic Surgery's Humble Beginnings

Today, people can choose from a seemingly infinite number of cosmetic procedures: breast implants, tummy tucks, liposuction, face-lifts, and more. The public’s growing fascination with plastic surgery—partly driven by the proliferation of reality TV shows featuring plastic surgeons and their patients— has created a boom industry that is now worth billions of dollars. But plastic surgery has a long and harrowing history that began on the bloody battlefields of the First World War, when mankind’s military technology wildly outpaced its medical capabilities. This talk reveals the astonishing true story of the pioneering surgeon Harold Gillies, who restored the faces of a brutalized generation, and in the process ushered plastic surgery into the modern era.

Under The Knife

The greatest men and women in history had one thing in common: mortality. From George Washington, whose doctors hastened his death by removing half a pint of his blood, to Winston Churchill, who underwent one of the earliest appendectomies, this talk looks at famous figures from the past who went under the knife and shows how the outcome changed world events.

Bullets & Bandages

Throughout history, war has proven that necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. Over the course of every human conflict, medicine has adapted, evolved, and triumphed. The French surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey created “flying ambulances” to provide rapid transport of the wounded during the Napoleonic Wars. During the First World War, the hematologist Oswald H. Robertson pioneered the idea of “blood banks” by packing glass jars of blood in an ice-filled chest that he had constructed from ammunition cases. And huge advances were made in the field of plastic surgery when Archibald McIndoe began experimenting with skin grafts on the “Guinea Pig” pilots who had been severely burned during the World War II. This talk explores the human cost of war, and the medical innovations that arose from its horrors.

Fail Like a Scientist

In the 19th century, the surgeon W.H.B. Winchester designed an amputation saw that ran on a self-winding mechanism. Unfortunately, it was difficult to control and lacked the precision of other surgical instruments. When Winchester trialed it in the operating room, he ended up slicing off his assistant’s fingers! Fortunately for Winchester’s staff, the instrument never made it out of prototype. But the surgeon’s epic failure did teach others in his field a valuable lesson about the need for precision over speed. This talk looks at how failure is an essential part of medical progress, and at how triumph and disaster are two sides of the same coin.