The First Modern Piece Of Protective Workwear

The biggest modern focus of trade workwear is to provide professional, hard-wearing clothing that also keeps its wearer safe from various forms of known risk.

Ripstop trousers, steel-toed boots and safety helmets all help to protect people from the short-term and long-term damage that can take place on-site, but despite those inventions being relatively modern, the concept of PPE is exceptionally old and far older than the term itself.

From Antiquity To Modernity

Defining early PPE is difficult, particularly without including body armour and other forms of early combat equipment as “PPE”. Gloves, or at least covering one’s hands with a cloth, were used since early antiquity to avoid sharp thorns and brambles, with boots being similarly ancient to protect the soles and later the ankles.

There were various forms of makeshift equipment for particular roles dating back an exceptionally long time. For as long as apiculture has existed, beekeeper suits have existed in some form or another, with accounts of mediaeval PPE to protect practitioners from harm.

As well as this, there were the plague doctors, people who wore masks with beaks featuring various fragrances due to the belief that the smell was a sign of miasma, and was in itself spreading the plague.

It would take until Joseph Lister and the profound debunking of miasma theory in favour of germ theory before the modern history of PPE could begin.

Like many vital safety innovations, it emerged as the result of tragedy.

The Mask Of Manchuria

In the winter of 1910, a deadly pneumonic plague spread through the northeast Chinese province of Manchuria, killing over 60,000 people in half a year and having a mortality rate of nearly 100 per cent, having been believed to be spread from tarbagan marmots bred for fur.

Whilst far from the first deadly pandemic, and was believed to have been part of a much larger third wave of plagues that had sporadically broken out since the middle of the 19th century, this was one of the first that received international attention and with a more modern approach.

The leader of efforts to contain and stop the plague was the Chinese-Malaysian doctor Wu Lien-Teh, who became a Doctor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, specialising in bacteriology and infectious diseases.

Having determined via autopsy that the plague was spread via the air, Dr Wu created one of the first modern pieces of PPE equipment in the form of a layered protective face mask and was one of the first to use both cremation and quarantine in order to battle the pandemic.

At the time, other members of the international medical community who had come to help battle the pandemic did not believe they would provide any benefit and were tragically proven wrong.

Gérald Mesny of France refused to wear a mask and passed away just a few days after visiting people suffering from the disease. Other doctors, such as missionary worker Arthur F Jackson from the United Free Church of Scotland, unfortunately, did not get access to a mask in time.

This proved to be a pivotal moment in the history of protective workwear and would be the first step towards the creation of the hazmat suit.