Medicine: Seeded Skin

For repair of large burns or wounds surgeons often resort to skin grafts, which occasionally do not take, which usually look ugly. Last week the University of Cincinnati announced perfection of a substitute technique. Dr. Louis George Hermann, assistant professor of surgery, sprinkles flakes of chopped skin upon raw wounds. The skin cells take root, seedlike, in the moist raw surface, absorb nutriment, proliferate. In a short time the islands of growing skin touch each other, merge and make a sightly new skin. Dr. Hermann finds that which way the skin flakes fall does not matter. Like plant seeds they orient themselves, grow outward from their “soil.”

The idea is not new. In 1871 Dr. J. T. Hodgen of St. Louis sprinkled scrapings from the soles of patients’ feet upon healthy open wounds. He found that the small bits of sole grew rapidly, quickly covered the wound with new skin. In 1899 Dr. J. L. Wiggins of East St. Louis reported success with Dr. Hodgen’s method. In 1909 Dr. Lyman W. Childs of Cleveland published a modification of Dr. Hodgen’s method in the Southern Medical Society’s Journal. Dr. Childs removed small cubes of the outer layers of skin, partially dried them, then sowed them on healthy open wounds. He called his method “epithelial sowing.”

Cincinnati’s Dr. Hermann, 33, studied medicine in St. Louis, interned in Cleveland. His chief tools are a kind of meat grinder for shredding pieces of sound skin, a modified salt shaker for scattering the skin seeds on the wound which needs grafting.