Will New Dress Code for UK Doctors Cut Infection Rates?

Jones' commentary highlights the surgeons behind other key historical advances:

-- Obstetrician Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) established an early link between infection, surgeons' attire and cleanliness. He urged fellow surgeons to wash themselves, put on clean clothes and refrain from deliveries for 48 hours after coming into contact with a case of puerperal fever.

-- Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) from the ViennaMaternityHospital, noticed that a ward attended by medical students had a death rate of about 20 percent while a ward attended by midwives had a death rate of 3 percent. Students regularly came straight from the anatomy dissecting rooms without washing their hands, then performed internal examinations. Infection rates plummeted when they started washing their hands with chloride of lime when they entered the ward.

-- Joseph Lister (1827-1912) treated his first compound fracture – which was normally fatal in the 1860s - with wool soaked in carbolic acid (now known as phenol) after noticing it was used by a local sewage works to reduce the smell of the waste. He reported on the first 11 patients treated that way in the Lancet in 1867. Nine recovered without losing their limb, one survived but required an amputation and one died. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) the Germans, but not the French, adopted Lister's two great principles, that germs caused infections and laudable pus was not beneficial or inevitable. The German death rate after amputations was significantly lower than the French rate of 76 percent.

--Polish surgeon Johannes Von Mikulicz-Radecki (1850-1905) was probably the first to use a face mask and William Halstead (1852-1922) is said to be the first surgeon to use rubber gloves. He commissioned them from the Goodyear rubber company for his theatre sister who developed a skin irritation caused by repeatedly immersing her hands in antiseptic solution. Scottish surgeon William MacEwan (1848-1924) is credited with the introduction of a sterilizable surgical gown.