The men and women in the copper coats

In the Boston Public Garden, just across the street from where I live, there’s a monument to the first use of ether as an anesthesia in surgery. This triumph of medicine occurred in 1846, just down the street at Mass General Hospital. Here’s the painting commemorating this wonderful event.  You’ll notice that the men in white coats are all wearing, errrrr, black coats.

That’s because doctors didn’t start wearing white coats until the early 20th century when:

Doctors swapped their traditional black coats for white ones, similar to those worn by scientists in laboratories. This was meant to bolster a physician’s scientific credibility at a time when many practising healers were quacks, charlatans and frauds. As the importance of antiseptics became more widely understood, white was also thought to have the advantage of showing any soiling. (Source: The Economist)

My doctor wears a white coat over her civvies. But these days, if you’re seeing a doctor in a hospital setting, as often as not they’re in scrubs – even those who aren’t about to perform surgery. (Blue and green scrubs were introduced for surgery “to reduce eye strain in brightly-lit operating theatres.”) Hospital nurses, in my experience, are nearly 100% in some form of scrubs – and not just blue and green ones. I seem to recall a lot of purply-red ones and, at least for the women nurses, patterned tops. All worn with Dansko clogs, I believe. No more of those white starched dresses, the sensible white nursing shoes, the caps that indicated what nursing school someone had graduated from. (The caps for Mass General looked like little cupcakes.)

But white, black, blue, green, purply-red, or patterned, whatever the doctor’s wearing can be germ carriers. Which is why:

Many clinics and hospitals now have a “bare below the elbows” policy for staff, whether in uniform or their own clothes.

To prevent medical staff from being their own little germ vectors, Liu Xuqing of England’s University of Manchester, has come up with a way to make clothing that’s preventive medicine.

Some metals, such as gold and silver, have natural antibacterial properties and are used to coat certain solid items, such as medical implants. But putting metallic coatings onto stretchy and foldable fabrics is tricky, and those coatings can quickly be swept away in a washing machine. What is needed, reckons [Dr. Liu]… is a way to make antibacterial coatings for fabrics that, quite literally, hold tight.

And Dr. Liu has landed on copper, which like silver and gold, can kill germs dead before they spread, but is a lot cheaper.

Liu and his colleagues have come up with a process that “brushes” fabric and then treats it with a solution that contains copper. (The process is pretty interesting, and is worth a full read.)

The process works on both cotton and polyester – good thing: I’ve seen a lot of scrubs and I’m guessing that most contain poly… – and two of the bugs that it can kill are e coli and staph. Which is a good thing. So many people who are hospitalized end up with secondary infections they caught in the hospital, and that have nothing to do with what they were hospitalized for.

The tests show that the clothing makes it through 30 washings with its antibacterial magic intact. (By the way, it’s not just for the medical field. Food processing is another big bacteria producer, so this technology would be a good idea for chicken-pluckers et al.)

The good doctor is looking into other applications.

Dr Liu is considering other uses for his invention, as well. One of his thoughts is to make conductive threads that could form part of electrical circuits woven into clothing. Such circuits might, for instance, link sensors that monitor the body. They might even carry current and signals to other fibres, treated to change colour in response, to produce fabrics that vary in hue and pattern—maybe to reflect, as detected by sensors, the wearer’s mood. A doctor could then have a coat of many colours.

Hmmmm.  Don’t know how much I like the idea of wearing a full-length mood ring around all the time. Sure, nice if people could have an early warning, but there’s something invasion of the mood-snatchers about  it that me no like. Other than that…

There’s so much technology that is put to use innovating around things that are completely useless  or, worse, has a negative overall impact on users and society. (And, yes, social media, I’m looking at you, among others.) So I’m glad to see technology directed to a use that, first, does no harm.

If I’m ever hospitalized, I’d be delighted if the doctors and nurses come all decked out in copper.