The History Of Syringes.
The word syringe comes from the Greek "syrinx", which means "tube" and originally a tube was exactly what was used. They had to make a cut in the body in the place where they wished to administer the medication and put the tube end through that.
Fortunately for us in 1844 an Irish physician, Francis Rynd invented the hollow needle.
Then simultaneously, though independently, two physicians developed the first practical hypodermic syringes in 1853, which put together a metal syringe and the hollow pointed needle that could penetrate the skin without the need to cut an opening.
The two inventors were the Scottish physician Alexander Wood and the French physician Charles Pravaz.
Pravas's syringe had a piston which was driven by a screw so he could administer exact dosages.
Wood used his to inject morphine as a painkiller for neuralgic pains while Pravaz used his for the treatment of aneurysms.
Following these original inventions came a plethora of syringes, some made of metal combined with glass and some of glass alone (such as that developed by Wulfing Luer of France and made by Becton Dickinson (BD) in 1989).
These were calibrated in assorted ways and with detachable needles.
None were disposable and all had to be sterilised by boiling on a daily basis, soaked in alcohol between uses and the needles sharpened periodically with a whetstone.
Being an insulin dependant diabetic in those times must have been truly horrid!
You definitely wanted to own your very own needles and syringe because many serious infections were being passed on by health care workers using one needle for multiple patients.
The figures were becoming alarming and the syringe manufacturers were getting worried - about the future of their companies and their profits more than the ill people in most cases I suspect - okay, okay, so I'm a cynic!
Some other way was needed and eventually it arrived!
Though Arthur E. Smith received eight U.S. patents for a disposable syringe from 1949-1950 it was Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) who eventually mass produced the first glass disposable syringes in 1954, called the BD Hypak.
It must be admitted that diabetics were not who they had in mind when they did this - they produced these so Dr. Jonas Salk's new polio vaccine could be administered to around 1 million children in the US.
In 1955 the top brass of Roehr Products, worried about the litigation that could arise from infection caused by the use of their syringes, put their heads together and came up with the worlds first plastic disposable hypodermic syringe called the Monoject, which they sold for 5 cents each.
You would have thought health care professionals would have flocked to buy this but that did not happen. The doctors thought it was safer (for 'safer' read 'cheaper') to reuse glass syringes after sterilising them.
A year later, in 1956, a New Zealand pharmacist, Colin Murdoch, in an effort to come up with a better way of vaccinating animals, designed and patented the plastic disposable syringe that we know today. For that we diabetics feel he definitely deserves credits in heaven!
Meanwhile Becton Dickinson had been doing extensive development trials and tests and in 1961 introduced it's first plastic disposable syringe, the BD Plastipak.
Nowadays their range of safe, disposable syringes is found world-wide.
Needles are thinner, shorter and sharper, often specially coated for ease of entry and exit. Injecting yourself has certainly become a lot safer and easier, even if it is not the greatest thing to have to do every day.