Negotiating Technologies in Surgery: The Controversy about Surgical Gloves in the 1890s

This article examines the controversial discussions about surgical gloves in the German-language countries in the 1890s. Analyzing the controversy as a contradiction between two important strategies of modern surgery, manual control and aseptic control, it looks at the various ways surgeons dealt with the conflict. Most important, they tried to resolve the problem by designing gloves that reconciled the two conflicting control strategies. This perspective helps to better understand the lengthy process of negotiation and the detailed discussions in the decades before surgical gloves became a standard element of modern operating equipment.