Caroline Hampton Halsted: The First to Use Rubber Gloves in the Operating Room

Abstract

Caroline Hampton was the niece of Confederate General Wade Hampton III, who was later governor of South Carolina and a US senator (Figure ​(Figure11a). Caroline was born at Woodlands, adjacent to Millwood, Hampton's plantation home near Columbia, South Carolina. Her mother, Sally Baxter of New York (Figure ​(Figure11c), died of tuberculosis at age 29 in 1862 and her father, Colonel Frank Hampton (Figure ​(Figure11b), Wade's younger brother, was killed 9 months later at the Battle of Brandy Station in Virginia. Figure 1 Caroline's relatives: (a) her uncle, General Wade Hampton, (b) her father, Lt. Col. Frank Hampton, and (c) her mother, Mrs. Frank Hampton (Sally Baxter). Parts b and c reprinted with permission of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins ... Millwood was burned by Sherman's troops in February 1865, and Caroline was raised by her three aunts (the Hampton sisters) in a small house behind the ruins of Millwood (Figure ​(Figure22). In 1885, Caroline rebelled against her family and entered nursing school in New York City, graduating from New York Hospital in 1888 (Figure ​(Figure33). When the Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in 1889, she moved to Baltimore and was appointed chief nurse of the operating room by the famous surgeon Dr. William Halsted (Figure ​(Figure44). Figure 2 The remains of Millwood. Reprinted with permission of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Figure 3 Caroline Hampton in 1889. Reprinted with permission of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Figure 4 William Halsted in 1880, soon to become the first surgeon in chief when Johns Hopkins Hospital opened. Reprinted with permission of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Caroline became Dr. Halsted's scrub nurse, but she developed a severe contact dermatitis in 1889, as her sensitive hands could not tolerate the disinfectants mercuric chloride and carbolic acid (phenol). As Dr. Halsted explained (as quoted by Sherwin Nuland in Doctors: The Biography of Medicine): In the winter of 1889 and 1890—I cannot recall the month—the nurse in charge of my operating-room complained that the solutions of mercuric chloride produced a dermatitis of her arms and hands. As she was an unusually efficient woman, I gave the matter my consideration and one day in New York requested the Goodyear Rubber Company to make as an experiment two pair of thin rubber gloves with gauntlets. On trial these proved to be so satisfactory that additional gloves were ordered. In the autumn, on my return to town, an assistant who passed the instruments and threaded the needles was also provided with rubber gloves to wear at the operations. At first the operator wore them only when exploratory incisions into joints were made. After a time the assistants became so accustomed to working in gloves that they also wore them as operators and would remark that they seemed to be less expert with the bare hands than with the gloved hands. This has been called the most famous paragraph ever printed in the surgical literature, not only for its description of the introduction of rubber operating gloves (Figure ​(Figure55), but also because it represents the beginning of a love affair being recorded in the medical literature. In the words of one of Halsted's assistants, “Venus came to the aid of Aesculapius.” Halsted and Caroline married in June 1890. Dr. William Welch was the best man. Figure 5 One of the original rubber surgical gloves, which belonged to J. M. T. Finney. It was encased in lucite for the Johns Hopkins Hospital centennial. Reprinted with permission of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. ...