Burns Morris And Stewart Inc. history

Significant advances in infection control made burn eschar excision possible, when Lister in 1865 started successfully utilising carbolic acid (or phenol) as a method to sterilise surgical instruments and clean wounds.

Free skin grafting was successfully reproduced by Reverdin, who was still a student at the time, in 1869 to encourage healing and closure of slow healing or chronic wounds.

Schjerning advanced this idea of the relation of mortality with burn size in 1884; he found that death always followed if two thirds of the body was burned, to be expected if 50% of the body was burned, and generally occurred if a third of the body was burned.

The method of meshing grafts can be traced back to Lanz in 1907, who designed a cutting tool consisting of a series of small knives mounted in parallel to make multiple holes in a graft, forming a mesh.

When he studied the composition of blister fluid of patients injured in the Rialto Theatre fire in 1921, he found that it was similar to that of plasma and suggested that burn mortality may be due to loss of fluid rather than toxins.

A variety of therapies were developed to achieve this such as the tannic acid spray described by Davidson in 1925 which was believed to produce a cleaner wound.

The introduction of methods of accurately quantifying burn surface area such as the Lund and Browder chart in 1944 and ‘rule of nines’ by Wallace and Tennison led to fluid replacement strategies based on total body surface area burned.

Bactericidal and wound-healing properties of sodium hypochlorite solutions: the 1991 Lindberg Award.[J Burn Care Rehabil.