The Evolution of Syringe

Injection, a simple word, is the childhood shadows of countless people at the moment of being pricked.

We are now accustomed to drug injection therapy that works faster than oral drugs. However, it has actually experienced a very long evolutionary history. From the initial exploration thousands of years ago, it stumbled all the way. It was not until more than 70 years ago that people began to be able to use this method to treat diseases relatively safely.

In fact, when the first syringe was born in Rome in the 1st century AD, it was not equipped with a needle, and its function was not to inject drugs into the body. There are two main ways to use early syringes:

One is to treat cataracts. Surgeons in the 9th and 13th centuries made a syringe with a hollow glass tube to try to treat cataracts in the eyes of patients by means of suction.

The second and more important one is to use enema syringes. The material of early syringes was mostly animal bladder. The principle was to pour the intestinal cleansing liquid from the chrysanthemum with pressure.

In the 10th century, the natives of the American continent made early hypodermic syringes using animal bladders and hollow bird bones.

However, it was not until the 17th century that an intravenous injection test was tried for the first time. However, at this stage, human beings still do not have a decent needle.

On March 16, 1656, Christopher Wren gave the first intravenous injection（IV injection） in history with an animal’s bladder and goose quills.

This experiment was conducted on dogs. In order to plug the goose feather tube into the vein, Renn used a sharp knife to cut the vein from the ligation, so that the wound was big enough to fit a needle made of this goose feather, and then used an animal bladder to inject an opium tincture into the dog's body.

This experiment proved one thing-injections are faster. Injection therapy has entered the public eye, but in this era without needles, there are no methods and no props, making people unavoidably bald.

Finally, in 1844, the Irish doctor Francis Linde invented the hollow metal needle.

In 1853, Alexander Wood invented a medical hypodermic syringe. The needle is fine enough to pierce the skin. It has a thin hollow needle and a metal syringe barrel. Since then, people have entered the era of needle injection, and he is also known as the father of modern syringes.

However, injection therapy also brings new problems. The most influential categories are as follows:

The first category is overdose.

At that time, humans had no knowledge of the dosage of injection therapy, and the syringe did not have a scale display. As a result, some patients died of drug overdose in the early stage.

After realizing the problem of drug dosage, the syringe evolved in 1866 was more convenient for doctors to control dosage and observe drug residues.

The second category is cross infection.

In the early days, people did not thoroughly disinfect the syringes and needles. They even wiped the needles with alcohol and continued to use them repeatedly. This has led to many tragedies of cross infection.

In order to facilitate the sterilization of syringes, in 1946, the United Kingdom produced all-glass syringes to realize the free interchangeability of injection barrels, plungers and needles, which allows the syringes to be sterilized on a large scale in separate parts.

But this was not the safest way until 1949, when the era of disposable syringes came. In this year, Australian inventor Charles Rother manufactured the world's first disposable plastic hypodermic syringe. Since then, people have ushered in the era of injection therapy belonging to the general public.

Fortunately, the ancestors were smart and diligent enough, otherwise, injections would not be as simple as being pierced.