Scrub Green

In 1914 the San Francisco surgeon Harry Sherman described an operating room at St Luke's Hospital decorated in green, from the floor tiles to the towels.^{1, 2}

His stated reason was glare from white surfaces, which surgeons of the period described as tiring and, at worst, briefly blinding.¹

By about 1900 most operating theatres were white.¹ Berkeley Moynihan of Leeds wrote in the Lancet in 1915 that the reflected light was wearisome to the eye, and Sherman reported surgeons losing their sight for a moment when they looked up from the wound.¹ Under newer lighting, a 2009 history in the Canadian Medical Association Journal notes, glare also made anatomical features harder to tell apart.²

Sherman's answer came from colour theory.¹ After the 1906 earthquake he had a temporary operating room painted bright spinach green, chosen as the complement of the red of haemoglobin.¹ The permanent suite, finished in 1913, had a green tiled floor and a six-foot green wainscot, with white tiles above it and a buff ceiling, and the staff wore black gowns and hats.¹ He reported that his eyes could now rest on the detail of a wound without competing light.² Moynihan painted his own theatre green as well.¹

Not everyone agreed.¹ In 1917 William Secor of Kerrville, Texas, defended white rooms and proposed peaked caps and amber-tinted glasses instead.¹ In 1924 and 1925 the New York anaesthetist Paluel Flagg used an oxyhaemoglobinometer and the Munsell colour system to select a bluish green he called Eyerest Green.¹ He also developed a green fabric for drapes and gowns that would survive steam sterilisation.¹ By the middle of the century green was common in hospitals, and in 1955 the neurosurgeon William Feindel opened a unit in Saskatoon with a green surgical suite.^{1, 2}

Neither of these historical accounts mentions the explanation most often repeated today, that green cancels the afterimage left by staring at blood.^{1, 2} The concerns recorded at the time were glare and what Flagg called colour fatigue from constant gazing into the wound.¹

The colour stayed. The reason now attached to it is not the one its first users gave.