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British Army hospitals on practically all the allied fronts. As a rule the American 

 surgeons did not take kindly to the type of sphagnum pad made by the British, 

 so that shortly after our entrance into the war the American Red Cross as well 

 as private individuals undertook rather extensive experiments in an effort not 

 so much to improve the efficiency of the dressings as to make them in a form that 

 might be more acceptable to the American surgeon. A brief account of the 

 results of some of these experiments, including the methods of gathering, storing 

 and cleaning the moss, as well as a rather detailed account of making the dress- 

 ings, has been published.^ 



In these articles it has been shown quite definitely that the value of sphagnum 

 for surgical dressings lies largely in its power to absorb an excessive amount of 

 fluid, which in some species is as high as twenty times the dry weight. The 

 mechanism by which this is made possible consists of the large, empty, perforated 

 cells in the stem and leaf, especially in the latter, as shown in figures 5-8. 



Many of us who were working with sphagnum in this country have wondered 

 how the Germans used it as a surgical dressing. Most of the following informa- 

 tion on the subject was obtained directly from Berlin through the kindness of 

 the German Red Cross. 



Like many great discoveries and inventions the value of sphagnum as a 

 surgical dressing was discovered, at least as far as the medical profession of 

 Germany was concerned, by sheer accident. Prior to this discovery sphagnum 

 doubtless was used locally as a dressing for wounds as it was in Scotland and 

 Ireland, but its approval and sanction by members of the medical profession was 

 not established until the latter part of last century. It was Neuber, a surgeon at 

 Kiel, in 1882, who published the following remarkable story. 



In the early eighties of last century a workman at one of the outlying peat 

 moors in north Germany accidentally sustained a severe lacerated wound of the 

 forearm. In the absence of anything better to apply to the wound, his fellow- 

 workmen wrapped it up with fragments of peat which were lying near, and 

 after an interval of ten days he arrived at the surgical clinic at Kiel with the 

 original dressing undisturbed. It was feared that the wound when examined 

 would be found in a very unsatisfactory state, but, on the contrary, when the 

 peat dressing was removed, the wound was found to have healed in a most 

 satisfactory manner. The unexpected result obtained with a dressing material 

 which, at first sight, seemed so unpromising led to a very careful inquiry into its 

 nature and properties. 



An investigation of the growing plant on the surface of the bog, down through 

 the various stages of decay to the brown amorphous depths below, was made 

 from the physical, chemical and bacteriological points of view. The practical 

 outcome of this inquiry was that the value of sphagnum as a surgical dressing 

 was found to be due to its marvellous power of absorbing fluids. It was found 

 that the growing plant collected and dried had this power at the maximum, but 



1 Presented at the regular meeting of the University of Washington Chapter of Sigma Xi. Feb. 

 16, 1921. 



