Supporting or sabotaging the surgeon’s efforts: portrayals of the surgical nurse’s role in preventing wound sepsis, 1895–1935
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To examine the surgical nurse's role in preventing wound sepsis (infection) and how this was portrayed in nursing literature in the pre-antibiotic period, 1895-1935. BACKGROUND: While the history of infection control in general has been researched for the mid-20th century, more detailed research is needed of the pre-antibiotic period, specifically of the surgical nurse's role in preventing wound sepsis. Closer examination is also warranted of the way the nurse's role was perceived in specific practice areas, such as surgeons' views of the surgical nurse's role. DESIGN: Historical research. METHODS: Analysis of historical British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand nursing journals and British and Australian surgical nursing textbooks. RESULTS: Between 1895-1935 skilled surgical nurses were valued as 'supporters' of the surgeon's heroic efforts, acting as diligent 'scrubbers' and vigilant 'sentries' to guard patients from microbial attack, yet tended to be blamed as 'saboteurs' and 'slovens' when wound sepsis occurred. The most noticeable changes in knowledge and practice related to greater use of sterilised dressing materials, less reliance on unnecessarily strong antiseptics, and less intensive methods in preparing surgical materials. CONCLUSIONS: Although the literature related the nurse's role to the surgeon rather than the patient, interpreting it merely as a subservient relationship would ignore the more complex portrayals evident in the literature. Surgeons looked for support rather than subservience, and a conscientious approach rather than obedience. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: This historical research shows nurses both the enduring nature of aspects of clinical knowledge and practice as well as the slow process of change in others. It reminds nurses of the danger of infection, the constant vigilance required and the measures needed when practising without antibiotics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".