Patients were coming through surgery clean and then going wrong weeks later, and nobody could say why. The operations had gone well. The wounds had closed. Then came the pain, the scarring, the strange masses of tissue surgeons kept finding when they had to go back in, and there was no name for any of it.
The person who worked out the answer was a farm girl from Falls County. May Owen came up hard, worked her way through school, and settled in Fort Worth as a pathologist, which is to say she spent her days with the tissue after the surgeon set down the scalpel. And she kept noticing the same thing turning up in samples that had no business looking alike.
She traced it to the talcum powder inside the surgeons' gloves. The powder that made a pair of gloves easy to pull on was coming off inside patients, and the body was reacting to it, walling it away, building scar tissue and adhesions around it. Her research on it came out in 1936. The problem was never the surgery. It was the glove.
She spent the rest of a very long career in Fort Worth and became the first woman to preside over the Texas Society of Pathologists, then the Tarrant County Medical Society, then the entire Texas Medical Association. She was still working as a pathologist when she died at ninety-six. It took the medical world decades to fully act on what she found, which is the ordinary fate of an inconvenient discovery. She found it anyway, in a lab in Fort Worth, because she was the one paying attention to the part everybody else considered routine.
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