Venus & Aesculapius: The Gloves of Love

Advancements in the medical sciences follow a well-trod path: observation of a problem, reasoned hypothesis and experimentation, and implementation of a solution. This course is governed by logic and, occasionally, reinforced by unorthodox thinking with the ultimate goal of improving the viability of man. An exception to this rule is the invention of the rubber glove. One of the most important breakthroughs in the practice of medicine was born not of careful problem-solving and the scientific process, but of a romantic gesture, a clinical schoolboy’s crush, an event which one observer described as “Venus [coming] to the aid of Aesculapius.”To step back a bit, let us begin by realizing that any progress in infection control in medicine throughout the modern history of the field came in fits and stops. In the nineteenth century, hospitals were “houses of death” to be avoided at all cost due to non-existent standards of sanitation. Hands went unwashed between patients and coats spattered with pus and blood were habitually reused for surgeries. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes proposed that puerperal fever, an often fatal infection following childbirth, had an infectious, transmissible component to it - one directly linked to the hygiene of physicians. This would be later verified in 1847 by the physician Ignaz Simmelweiss as he documented a decline in maternal deaths after requiring his students to rinse their hands in antiseptic chlorine solution (1). However, Simmelweiss was widely derided by his peers for lacking an empirical explanation for his findings and it would be many years before his proposal was accepted.