AN ADDRESS ON A NEW ANTISEPTIC DRESSING 



Delivered before the Medical Society of London, November 4, 1889. 

 [Lancet, 1889, vol. ii, p. 943.] 



Mr. President and Gentlemen. — When I last had the honour, five 

 years ago, of addressing this Society at the request of its President, I brought 

 before you an attempt I had made to utihze the powerful antiseptic properties 

 of corrosive sublimate without the great disadvantages attendant upon its 

 highly irritating qualities.^ I had ascertained that when corrosive sublimate 

 precipitates albumen the precipitate is not, as had been generally supposed, 

 an albuminate of mercury — that is to say, a combination of albumen as an 

 acid with mercury as a base ; in other words, that the albumen does not displace 

 the chloride from its combination, but that the bichloride of mercury retains its 

 properties intact, the albumen being loosely associated with it, in a species of 

 solid solution, if I may so speak. 



Further, I had found that this precipitate, even after drying, is capable 

 of being dissolved in the serum of the blood, and that the solution in blood- 

 serum is powerfully antiseptic while not irritating. I proposed and brought 

 before you a new dressing in the shape of what was termed the sero-sublimate 

 gauze, charged with a solution of corrosive sublimate in the serum of the blood. 

 This gauze gave very satisfactory results, both in my own hands and in those of 

 surgeons in places so far distant as Poland and Spain. Nevertheless, it was not 

 all that could be desired by any means ; it was somewhat harsh mechanically ; 

 it was not very absorbent (a serious defect), and one of the materials of which 

 it was made (the serum of horse's blood) was not always easily obtainable. 

 I was, therefore, well disposed to look for something superior. 



A few weeks after that communication was made to the Society, a firm 

 of manufacturing chemists, Messrs. Gibbs, Cuxson & Co., wrote to me saying 

 that they had found that if chloride of ammonium or sal ammoniac in cjuantity 

 equal to one-fifth part of the weight of the bichloride of mercur\- was added 

 to the mixture of bichloride of mercury and blood-serum, the result was a much 

 more Huid preparation than I had obtained. If I used a ]-)reparation of one 

 part of bichloride of mercury to 100 of blood-serum, I got a thick litjuid some- 

 what difficult to diffuse in gauze. They therefore suggested that by adding 



' See p. J93 of this volume. 



