Caroline Hampton

Caroline Hampton Halsted (20 November 1861 – 27 November 1922) was a nurse who became the first to use medical gloves in the operating room. Biography Caroline Hampton was a member of a prominent southern family; her uncle, Wade Hampton III, was a Confederate General, governor of South Carolina, and a US senator. Her mother, Sally (Baxter) Hampton died in 1862 of tuberculosis. Her father, Colonel Frank Hampton, died at the Battle of Brandy Station in early 1863 during the American Civil War. Their family home Millwood was burned, and Hampton was raised by three aunts, with the expectation that she would marry well, ideally to a southern plantation owner. Against her family's wishes, she went to nursing school in New York. She trained first at Mount Sinai Hospital and then at New York Hospital, graduating in 1888. In 1889 she became chief surgical nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, working for William Stewart Halsted. Rubber gloves The impetus for Hampton's use of gloves was her sensitive skin. Previously she had to wear gloves when gardening, and the procedures at the hospital caused her to develop severe contact dermatitis and painful eczema. Halsted, as a supporter of the germ theory of disease, used strict hygienic measures in his operating theater. People had to cleanse their hands using soap, followed by a caustic solution of potassium permanganate, a hot oxalic acid bath, and a mercury chloride compound. In the winter of 1889 Caroline Hampton informed Halsted of her intention to resign due to the effects on her hands.