glove, covering for the hand with separate sections for the fingers and thumb, sometimes extending over the wrist or part of the arm. Fingerless gloves, called mitts in colonial America, have five holes through which the fingers and thumb extend.
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Well-formed linen gloves with a drawstring closure at the wrist were found in the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamen (14th century bc). Ancient Greek and Latin literature contain many allusions to gloves. Medieval European nobles, patricians, and prelates wore gloves made of fabric or leather, often richly jeweled and embroidered. By the 14th century, gloves were worn generally by upper-class men; but not until the 16th century did Catherine de Médicis, queen consort of Henry II of France, set the fashion for women. At the turn of the 17th century, women’s gloves of soft kidskin were introduced.
The ancient art of glove making became an industry in 1834, when Xavier Jouvin of Grenoble, France, invented the cutting die that made possible a glove of precise fit. The kid glove has retained supremacy as the aristocrat of gloves, but other kinds of leather are also utilized in modern glove manufacture, including capeskin, cabretta, pigskin, buckskin, reindeer skin, and lambskin, also called doeskin.
There are usually eight components of a leather glove: palm and back (one piece), thumb, three fourchettes (slender pieces of leather that form the sides of the fingers), and three quirks, or diamond-shaped pieces inserted at the bottom between the fingers. In cutting gloves, a single trank, or rectangular piece of leather the size of the glove, may be cut by hand to a desired pattern with shears; or a number of tranks may be cut simultaneously by a weighted, sharp steel die. The glove is closed by stitching up along the outside to the tip of the little finger; then the thumbs, quirks, and fourchettes are set in and sewed with great care. Although some sewing is done by hand, most is by machine and closely resembles hand stitching. The completed glove is dampened, tailored on an electrically heated metal model hand, and buffed.
Fabric gloves of antiquity were made of woven material, but modern fabric gloves are knit. Silk was the favoured material before World War II, but the glove industry now relies on cotton and man-made fibres such as rayon and nylon. Glove-sized squares of finished fabric are arranged face-to-face so that the left and right hands are cut out together by the knife-sharp glove die, which is forced through the built-up layers of fabric. Gores, triangular pieces of fabric, are cut separately and attached between the fingers when the cutout glove is folded over and stitched together. Thumbs are also cut separately and attached. The fingers are given a tubular shape by seaming. Fabric gloves are tailored on electrically heated metal hands, as are leather gloves.
Gloves of wool, synthetic fibres, and cotton yarns can be knit by machine with or without seams; and their colours, designs, patterns, and stitch variations rival those of gloves knit by hand. Seamed, or wrought, gloves are first machine knit as flat selvage pieces of fabric, folded so that complementing parts fall together, and then stitched. Seamless gloves also may be knit entirely on such a flat machine, or the cuff and palm may be knit on a circular machine and then the stitches carefully transferred to a flat fingering machine.
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Learn MoreProtective gloves have been developed for special uses. Thin rubber or latex gloves are used by medical and laboratory personnel. Heavy rubber gloves are used by electrical workers. Asbestos gloves protect against burns, as do gloves of heavy, twisted loop pile similar to terry cloth. Canton flannel gloves treated with polyvinyl provide plastic-coated work gloves that are heat resistant, impermeable to most fluids, and proof against acids, alkalies, industrial oils, greases, and other chemicals. Lead-impregnated gloves may be used in order to shield the hands from X-rays.
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Participants in many sports wear gloves for protection or to improve grip. In baseball, players in the field wear one large padded leather glove, or mitt, to protect the fielder’s hand and to facilitate catching the ball via a pocket woven between the glove’s thumb and index finger. Hockey players and cricket batsmen wear oversized padded gloves on both hands to cushion them from the hard, fast-moving projectiles used in these sports. Thin gloves made of leather or synthetic material are used in a variety of sports, such as gridiron football, golf, and cycling, to enhance the wearer’s grip.
Let us digress and go back around 50 years for the background of antiseptic and aseptic surgery. At that time, hospitals were regarded as “houses of death” which patients tried to avoid, if possible, because of rampant infection. Surgeons would simply roll up their sleeves and work as quickly as possible, wearing the same coat for each operation. (The coats were usually covered with blood and pus and were called “working coats” or “badges of honor.”) Surgical mortality was around 50%.
However, in 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston made a presentation “on the contagiousness of puerperal fever,” suggesting that childbirth infection could be transmitted to others and emphasizing the personal cleanliness of doctors. The Hungarian doctor Semmelweiss made the same discovery in 1847 in Vienna and required his students to wash their hands in an antiseptic disinfectant (chlorine) solution before examining patients, and the maternal death rate went from 18% to 1%.
In 1867, Joseph Lister (Figure ), an English surgeon, published the groundbreaking paper “Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery” while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He used 5% carbolic acid solution (or phenol) to spray instruments and wounds and made surgeons wash their hands before and after operations with this solution.
Open in a separate windowIn 1876, Lister traveled to the United States to present his ideas and impressed Dr. William Halsted with his findings. In 1884, Halsted returned to New York City after studying in Germany and refused to perform surgery in the old theater at Bellevue. Instead, he built a tent on the grounds of Bellevue that featured a gas stove to boil instruments. Halsted was sold on Listerian techniques, which were still somewhat controversial until German bacteriologist Robert Koch's postulates in 1882 effectively proved that microorganisms caused disease. (Koch later won the Nobel Prize in 1905.)
Gustav Neuber, a German surgeon who embraced Lister's technique, in 1883 sterilized instruments and the operative field and was the first to require sterile gowns and caps. In 1897, Jan Mikulicz, a Polish Austrian surgeon, was the first to use a surgical mask and also was a pioneer of using gloves during surgery.
At Johns Hopkins, Dr. William Halsted didn't start wearing gloves himself at first. They were used by nurses and assistants but rarely by the doctors (except for the open bone and joint operations). Dr. Joseph Bloodgood, Halsted's protege who came to Hopkins in 1892, was later the director of surgical pathology and started using gloves himself during surgery in 1896 (Figure ). (“Why shouldn't the surgeon use them as well as the nurse?”) In 1899, Bloodgood published a report on over 450 hernia operations with a near 100% drop in the infection rate by using gloves. Halsted said, “Why was I so blind not to have perceived the necessity for wearing them all the time?” Hunter Robb, a gynecologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was another Halsted associate who was a pioneer of aseptic surgery and sterile gowns and one of the first to wear rubber gloves.
Open in a separate windowAfter his honeymoon at the Hampton Hunting Lodge in Cashiers, North Carolina, Halsted became enthralled with the beauty of the property and realized it would be a retreat from the heat and humidity of the Baltimore summers. He purchased over 400 acres from Caroline's aunts and called the property “High Hampton,” a name that combined the two families, as the Halsted estate in England had been called “High Halsted.” Later the Halsteds built a cottage (Figure ).
Open in a separate windowThereafter, Dr. Halsted typically left Baltimore on June 1 and returned around October 1. Caroline would arrive in May and stay until Thanksgiving. She was very active running the farm, directing the hired hands and planting the garden and crops. She worked in the fields from morning till night. She loved animals, especially horses and dogs. A very skilled rider, she was known for her horsemanship. Dr. and Mrs. Halsted raised a superb collection of prized dahlias and planted many unusual trees on the property, which eventually grew to around 2200 acres after Halsted bought out the adjacent small farms.
The Halsteds were described as opposites in appearance. “He was a dandy, garbed in European tailored suits and Parisian cobbled boots, who dressed impeccably, even sending his dress shirts to Paris to be laundered” (Figure ). In contrast, Caroline's style was described as “plain and austere.” Nevertheless, they were remarkably well suited to each other, each being reserved and self-sufficient and somewhat “eccentric.” They were truly devoted to each other. Letters between Halsted and Caroline were warm and personal and playful.
Open in a separate windowDear Wm.
How do you like to get type written letters from me. I should think that it would be such a relief to your mind. The damp weather has not agreed with the machine and it is going very heavy. The wind has been from every point of the compass and has finally settled at the east. Yesterday all the clouds were travelling south and tho' it was cloudy we had hopes. Now there seems no chance for anything but another rain. It is a little cooler but not as cold as I should like to have it. I had an interview with “Eno” this a.m. He says you never mentioned stairs to him. Sweetman says that the good Franklin carpenter is not working for Hayes now and that he only asks $1.75. He is the one who did the very nice inside work of which you spoke. Crow says that he heard that you had paid the Longs something and as they owed him seven or eight dollars he went to collect and they positively denied having received one cent from you. Mrs. Long is reported to have pleurisy and I think that she deserves it. There are so many chestnuts that no one bothers to gather them. How you would enjoy being here and how I would enjoy having you.…
The Halsteds would typically spend 1½ hours at dinner discussing science, medicine, farming, and even etymology. The latter was one of Halsted's longstanding interests. He kept a notebook of unusual words, and he and Caroline would discuss the derivations of words at dinner.
Halsted died in 1922, and Caroline passed away only 2 months after him.
In summary, Caroline was a remarkable lady who introduced rubber gloves in the operating room, ran High Hampton, and lived for 32 years with a complex man who was a creative genius and the father of American surgery.
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