Todayis September 22

On this date in 1949, David Coverdale was born in England. He has been a member of the bands Deep Purple and more recently Whitesnake.

Also, actress Bonnie Hunt is one year wiser today. She has starred in several movies. Most recently, she voiced a character in the animated film called “Cars”.

And the ice cream cone, of all things, blows out a few birthday candles of its own today. It so happens that the original patent for the Ice Cream Cone was filed on this date in the year 1903.

And finally..

Our story today starts in England, but it will end in the most unlikely of places.

Let’s start with Joseph Lister. He was born in England in 1827. He would attend the University of London and soon, he would graduate with a Bachelor of Medicine degree and then he enrolled at another university called the Royal College of Surgeons.

After his student days were over, he would go on to teach surgery at the University of Glasgow. Now, keep in mind that this was over 150 years ago. Compared to today’s high-tech medical treatments, methods and techniques, virtually nothing was known of medicine at the time.

So little was known of germs, bacteria and infection that even in the best of hospitals, facilities for washing doctors’ hands and patients’ wounds did not exist. Doctors did not even wash their hands before surgery. Due to a lack of understanding of hygiene, well over 75 percent of all patients of major surgery at the time would die.

Dr. Joseph Lister, after reading a recently published paper by Louis Pasteur, would be the first to realize why surgeries were rarely successful. He would start to understand how microorganisms could cause deadly infections in his patients. Dr. Lister would pioneer the field of cleanliness as it related to medicine.

Soon he was publishing papers himself and giving lectures on the importance of sanitary medical procedures. In the year 1876, he would give one such lecture in Philadelphia. His ideas were so new and radical that most of his audience discounted him and his lecture as nothing but fiction. However, there were two people in the audience that day that thought maybe, just maybe, Dr. Lister knew what he was talking about.

A few years later, one of those two people, named Joseph Lawrence, would invent and sell an antibacterial liquid called Listerine, named, of course, after Dr. Lister.

Another person in the audience that day was a pharmacist named Robert Johnson and he also would profit from the ideas of Dr. Lister. He invented and started selling gauze pads and they were always shipped in germ-resistant packages, just as Dr. Lister would recommend. Robert Johnson and his brothers started a business through which his gauze pads would be sold. The company’s name was, and still is, Johnson and Johnson. One of the employees at the company was a young, newlywed named Earle Dickson. Unfortunately, his new, young wife had not quite mastered the art of preparing food and cooking. Nearly every day he would return home to find his wife’s fingers cut, scratched and bleeding. It seems that the sharp edges of the kitchen knives, in the hands of his young, awkward and clumsy wife would not just slice the cabbage, tomatoes, lettuce or carrots. Oftentimes the knives would also slice her fingers as well. In order to patch up his wife’s cuts, Earle would often bring home with him some of the gauze that his employer produced. He would use small pieces of household adhesive tape to wrap the gauze around his wife’s bleeding fingers.

Now, I promised you a few minutes ago that this story would end in an unusual location. It will end in your very own home..in your bathroom..in your medicine cabinet. When you get home this evening, look in your medicine cabinet. There, behind the bottle of aspirin, right next to the razor you’ll likely find the product that Earle Dickson invented to take care of his wife’s cut fingers. It’s some adhesive and bits of Johnson and Johnson gauze. We now call those two items, when they’re combined into one product, a Band-Aid and it was invented by Earle Dickson on this date, September 22, in the year 1921.

..And that is just one of the things that has occurred on this day in history