I know bottles were made of glass, but what was IV tubing made of before the invention and widespread use of plastics?
What other common devices used in heathcare (latex gloves, syringes, needles, pulse-ox machines, anesthesia equipment) have changed since World War II and The Korean War?
I know most people here were nota round then, but I thought some folks might know from stories of family and friends.
I have been watching M*A*S*H and it has really got me thinking of nursing in the last half century.
Thanks for all this great info. I will check out that book ASAP.
They did an episode on ventricular aneurysms on M*A*S*H* yesterday. It was when they introduced Charles Emerson Winchester. BJ and Hawkeye had never done the surgery. Charles had just come up to the 4077 as a sub because Frank had gone AWOL.
Charles oversewed the aneurysm. I forget the kind of suture.
My surgical tech instructor showed us how to set up the old chest tube bottles. I saw those when I was working overseas in mission work.
I've been around over 25 years now and trained with the old manifold set-up for Swans that came from Central all sterile wrapped. We had to use sterile technique to put the stopcocks on the manifold and they had to be turned hourly to flush the lines or the lines would clog up. There was also a huge transducer with a plastic dome top (about the size of a fat cigar). We set up our cardiac output in a sterile beaker with saline and a thermometer in a big sterile pan of ice. Using sterile technique we drew up 5 syringes of sterile saline and dropped them into the ice water and waited for the temp to come down to about 30 degrees Cent. Then we used a HUGE machine to calculate the C.O. as we pushed the iced saline through the Swan. Thank goodness for the Sorenson's!!
My mother was a nurse in the 1940's. When she was a student nurse, they were taught also by the doctors. The hospital would have floors that had 40 patients and her an another student nurse would be in charge of it. They only had 2 antibiotics, sulfa and penicillin. In the nursery, the nurse would make up all the baby's formula in very sterile conditions. When the new baby came, there wasn't a first bath, the baby would would be wiped down with olive oil. New mothers stayed for a week. Nurses would have an inspection before their shift. This was to make sure their uniform, shoes, hair, etc. was just right. Everyone wore their caps. No ICU's, there was private duty nursing.
IV's were sometimes just given under the skin, not in a vein. I'm glad of our times!!!!
You will be an awsome nurse!! I remember metal bedpans and urinals that hurt when thrown at 3 am. We washed out the red rubber NGT to re use as that was "clean" not "sterile". Gloves were minimal as they made the patient feel "alienated" and "contagious" We never used gloves for any thing but "sterile technique" The intra-aortic ballon pump was a huge green machine that we kept plugged in because they said we had to!! We would rather "count the ggts" than trust that funny machine that did nothing but alarm. We watched acute Mi's have pain and give sublingual nitro with morphine and hope they were alive in the AM. We saw every arrythmia known to man depending on where the Mi was. Open hearts were kept intubated for 3 weeks to allow the "heart and lungs to rest" Chest tubes were three bottles on the floor. We wore white hose white dresses and perfect nurses caps!! We used methylene blue in EVERY tube feed to be sure they did not asparate, so what if their urine was alittle bluish! Ventricular aneurysms were common and they turned someone blue from the nipple line up. Rotating tourniquets were first line for Pulmonary Edema/CHF. I remember the first time I hung IV nitro...we thought if we dropped it it would explode!! No ICU/CCU was without a roll of tin foil as Nipride needed to be protected from light...all the way to the site!! Amphotericin B was the horror antibiotic of the living dead and Levophed was leave them dead levophed!!
You did not tell the patient about anything just that the "doctor ordered it" and does anyone remember the doctor's smoking at the nurses station or putting their ciggaretts out in the ash tray in the paitents room????? Iv's were glass tubing was rubber. It was grains, drams, minims ande nothing was by weight. I remember a cardioligist who at the bedside of a coding patient insisted on mouth to mouth!!!! Being the only "real way" to ventilate someone. We had no clue as to the full ramifications of our actions as the "doctor said so" The code cart was a nightmare as were the Vents they resembled high powered generators to power New York! I remember Bretolol being flown in from Chicago for a lady in "torsades de point" what is torsades I asked!! IV subq was common in dehydrated Pedi. Glass syringes and multidose bottles for narcs. If they moved restrain them if they detox start an alcohol gtt. Ashot and a beer at hs was a common order. We chased more mercury therm. than I can count heck we smoked at the desk!!! By the way..in nursing school my future sci-fi paper was on the "ventricular assist device and the jarvik artificial heart.... for hust a few boston
Thanks to all of you for the smiles and laughs I've gotten from reading this thread. I needed them. I've been in nursing 28 yrs. and just do remember some of these things. I worked a few places that still had metal bedpans and we used "soft" red rubber catheters for in & out bladder caths. Ya'll remember putting NGT's in the freezer for a while so they would be easier to insert? Otherwise they just bent and squished. When I was a student the med room had a large unlocked white cabinet full of "stock bottles" of meds. All of them were about quart size. Injectables such as Phenergan, PCN were also in large multidose vials.
I'm in middle Georgia now and came from a busy SICU in Fla. 22 yrs. ago. When I first got to work here I felt I had gone back 20 years as they were still using glass IV bottles instead of bags. Of course one of the first things I did was drop a full bottle about 3AM. Sounded like a shot gun going off.
When I started working in ICU's in the early 80's, the monitoring equipment for Swans sat on a cart at the bedside. There was a little screw used to calibrate them and of course you needed the little screw driver provided by HP to do this. Needless to say the screwdrivers were always promptly lost. But nurses, being the ingenious people they are, soon found a dime worked very well. The transducers had a dome that screwed open and you had to put saline on the membrane. It always took me several tries to get the blasted dome back on because if you didn't hold your mouth just right while doing it, the saline spilled off and your numbers were wrong.
We were taught of HYPODERMOCLYSIS in nursing school, but I didn't see it in practice until the late 80's. An older MD at my hospital felt it was easier than IV's on his very young or very old pts. I agree with him. It works very well. Before my time, but I remember my mother telling me of giving enemas for dehydrated children with N/V who couldn't hold down liquids. Works too.
When I was a kid visiting the family doctor, you knew that he was getting the syringe when he opened the cover of the sterilizer (looked like a huge toaster). Steam was coming out, like he was cooking something in a cauldron. I don't know what he gave us, but it was always the same thing for every ailment. It made you go to sleep for hours.
had a talk with a fellow nurse a few years ago about nursing in her mom's day. apparently they heated up meds in some kind of fluid, would draw it into a syringe, and RUN to the pt's room to give it before it precipitated out from cooling...thought she said it was for iv meds. wild as to what we all consider 'safe' practice now-esp with all the other posts.:rotfl:
Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
One of my nursing instructors told us that when she was in nurses training they were so poor they used to use Milk of Magnesia in place of polish on their white duty shoes! It probably worked really good because if you've ever tried to clean up a spot of MOM that has dried--good luck.
It was fun to read all the posts. I had heard of most of the things written about. The first nursing home I worked in had a small old sterilizer that sat on the counter in the clean utility room. The nurses used to wrap their own dressing change supplies and then sterilize them in this contraption. They had a larger one in the dirty utility room and us aides had to collect all the metal bedpans and urinals once a week, scrub them and sterilize every one of them in this sterilizer weekly.
There were no fitted bottom sheets when I started nursing. One of the first things we learned to do was make a very neat mitered corner. We also had a drawsheet on every patient bed that had to be perfectly centered between the ends of the mattress--and it had to be tight!
In the 80's one of our alcohol detox docs would sometimes order IV paraldehyde for his patients. It had to be given with a glass syringe which had to be hunted up in central service. This drug literallly "melts" plastic. We we told to inject it in the nearest port to the IV site and then flush afterwards with a lot of saline. Then hold your nose when you went into that patient's room because paraldehyde is excreted through the lungs and it stunk of the intense, nasty fruity smell as only an aldehyde can.
I remember all the old techniques you're all mentioning. Hey, anybody remember Dakins solution and what it was used for? How about Benzoin? An Np told me recently no one uses that anymore.
That is a smell that is absolutely unmistakable and you never ever forget it! I also remember the glass syringes. Sometime in the seventies Paraldehyde became available premixed in glass tubes. But as was said, you still had to keep some glass syringes around to draw it up.
In the 80's one of our alcohol detox docs would sometimes order IV paraldehyde for his patients. It had to be given with a glass syringe which had to be hunted up in central service. This drug literallly "melts" plastic. We we told to inject it in the nearest port to the IV site and then flush afterwards with a lot of saline. Then hold your nose when you went into that patient's room because paraldehyde is excreted through the lungs and it stunk of the intense, nasty fruity smell as only an aldehyde can.
sunnyjohn
2,450 Posts
Thanks for all this great info. I will check out that book ASAP.
They did an episode on ventricular aneurysms on M*A*S*H* yesterday. It was when they introduced Charles Emerson Winchester. BJ and Hawkeye had never done the surgery. Charles had just come up to the 4077 as a sub because Frank had gone AWOL.
Charles oversewed the aneurysm. I forget the kind of suture.
My surgical tech instructor showed us how to set up the old chest tube bottles. I saw those when I was working overseas in mission work.