A portable sterilizer for private operations / by Willy Meyer.

  • Meyer, Willy, 1858-1932.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A portable sterilizer for private operations / by Willy Meyer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Now the apparatus is self-acting. If the lamp extin- guishes, that means, if after thirty minutes the last drop of alcohol has been consumed, we can rest assured that everything in the apparatus is sterilized and ready for the operation. It will be found that the gauze thus steamed is not wet, but almost entirely dry. To be quite sure, one of the towels should be spread on top of the dress- ings. 1 Meanwhile the patient will have been narcotized, shaved, and prepared on the table. The boiled soda-water in the kettle can be well used for immersing the instruments in other vessels, during the course of the operation as is required in an operation which is conducted on strict aseptic principles. If any- body prefers to adhere to his former mode of proceeding, he may keep the instruments immersed in a two or three per cent, carbolic solution. He ought to be aware, how- ever, that the water must be boiled which he uses for making up the solution. He will better add two table- spoonfuls (six teaspoonfuls) of pure carbolic acid to the two quarts of soda solution (vide Schimmelbusch : Asep- tische Wundbehandlung, Berlin, 1892, page 69), thus making a one to one and one-half per cent, solution of carbolate of soda, and put the instruments in this fluid. This seems to me to be the best mode of proceeding, as the plain soda solution makes the instruments quite slip- pery. Or at last he may keep them spread on a steril- ized gauze compress and have the blood, etc., now and then washed off in a vessel filled with the sterilized soda solution. The only plausible objection which could be found to my sterilizer is that the instruments boil four times longer than necessary, namely, twenty four minutes. 1 Too much stress has been wrongly laid upon the necessity of a dry condition of the steamed (aseptic) gauze. Aseptic (steamed) gauze, which, say, is moistened by the condensed steam, is abso- lutely harmless and perfectly reliable, just as much as that which had been artificially dried or kept dry in the apparatus. The direct ap- plication of moist “ steamed gauze ” on a fresh aseptic wound may perhaps be uncomfortable, but will certainly never involve a risk.