In a great original film on HBO tonight, Something the Lord Made, there was a scene set in an operating theater at Johns Hopkins Hospital* in the 1940s. The surgical team was wearing masks, but the observers, in tiered seats above, were not. There was nothing separating the observers from the patient, no glass or anything.
Is this historically accurate? Why wouldn’t it have presented a risk of infection to the patient?
*Where I was born!
Bump.
Well Johns Hopkins opened in 1876.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) is one of the Docs that discovered cross contamination of patients by medical personell. So it probably was not common knowledge that medical personell were a potential cause of infection. They used to sterilize operating theatres with weak carbolic acid solutions IIRC.
Pastuers most famous work was 1860’s so Germ theory of disease was still in its infancy when JHU was built. So I dunno if its accurate, but it would hardly shock me that an unsealed operating theatre existed especially for teaching purposes so an instructor could describe his actions as they happened and be able to be heard.
Thanks for a reply, drachillix.
I grant that the theater might have been present at Hopkins as late as the 1940s. The question is, would unmasked and un-gowned observers have watched an operation (on an infant, no less) in such a setting? Wouldn’t that have posed some risk to the patient? Or would the distance (10-20 feet or so) between the observers and the operating table be a sufficient barrier to infection?
Or is the movie taking license by putting the operation in a dramatic but technically inaccurate setting? (It was on television: they wouldn’t lie to us, would they?)
I thought there were more MDs here at SDMB. Anyone?