When you were young, and your heart was an open book, you used to say "Hey! I got cut or burned or bruised or scraped" and you would run home or to the first-aid station or the school nurse. I can never forget that we Towson High kids were treated for our boo-boos by a nurse named Mrs Payne.
And our Driver Ed teacher was named Rex Carr! All right, he wasn't.
Treating that wound, someone would break out the first aid kit, first cleaning the abrasion and then daubing on mercurochrome, the antibacterial disinfectant that also contained mercury! After that, the wound was covered in gauze or a bandaid.
Yikes! It turns out that C20H8Br2HgNa2O6, the chemical formula for mercurochrome, is bad for you because of the mercury it contains, even though it's just the teeniest amount.
Today, we use a little schmear of antibiotic goo, and then comes the gauze or bandaid. And do you know what? We have heard a lot about the place where gauze comes from since the October invasion.
That's right, gauze is a light fabric made of openly-woven cotton for medical dressings. The name comes from the Palestinian city of Gaza, where years and years ago, skilled weavers created it.
How sad is it that so many wounds are still occurring in the very land where wound dressing was created?
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