History of wound care
Wounds naturally heal by themselves, but hunter-gatherers would have noticed several factors and certain herbal remedies would speed up or assist the process, especially if it was grievous.
Over time, different civilizations began to create their own herbal medicinal treatments for wounds depending on the trees, shrubs, or any other type of plants located in their environment.
[7][8] As tribal healers developed into doctors, it spurred on a primitive pharmaceutical industry that included traders who would travel overseas bringing herbs that would be used for specific wounds.
Galen of Pergamum, a Greek surgeon who served Roman gladiators circa 120–201 A.D., made many contributions to the field of wound care.
[10] A seminal work of traditional Chinese medicine was the Huangdi neijing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon) compiled between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC (i.e. originating in the Warring States period), which viewed the human body, its organs and tissues through the lens of the metaphysical five phases and yin and yang, and stated a belief in two circulatory channels of qi vital energy.
[11] In surgery, Han dynasty era Chinese texts offered practical advice for certain procedures such as clinical lancing of abscesses.
One of the first uses was wine mixed with oil was a common remedy in the ancient world to cleanse wounds and assuage their pain as noted in the context of Alcohol in the Bible.
[17] A medical prescription from Mesopotamia describes a method for healing wounds:[18][19] Pound together fur-turpentine, pine-turpentine, tamarisk, daisy, flour of inninnu strain; mix in milk and beer in a small copper pan; spread on skin; bind on him, and he shall recover.Another peoples to take advantage of the cleansing properties of alcohol were the Greeks.
[20] There were limited advances that continued throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but the most profound advances—both technological and clinical—came with the development of microbiology and cellular pathology in the 19th century.
[citation needed] The first advances in wound care in this era began with the work of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician who discovered how hand washing and cleanliness in general in medical procedures prevents maternal deaths.
[21] These innovations in wound-site dressings marked the first major steps forward in the field since the advances of the Egyptians and Greeks centuries earlier.
In 1886, Ernst von Bergmann introduced heat sterilization of surgical instruments, which marked the beginning of aseptic surgery and significantly reduced the frequency of infections.
The next advances would arise from the development of polymer synthetics for wound dressings and the "rediscovery" of moist wound-site care protocols in the mid 20th century.
This dawn of modern wound care treatment initiated a process of improvement in the clinician's ability to bolster wound-site re-epithelialization and healing.
"Living skin equivalents" may have the potential to serve as cellular platforms for the release of growth factors essential for proper wound healing.
Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Grande Armée pioneered the use of maggots to prevent infection in wounds.
Maggots give off an enzyme that disinfects wounds and promotes healing and this is why they became the first organism in the United States that were used as a medical device in January 2004.
