People tried to use items at their disposal more and more effectively, made new inventions, traveled all over the globe to set foot on undiscovered lands. They discovered new techniques and kept perfecting those invented earlier. Of course, this also applies to the field of wound care.

Necessity has always been the mother of invention. The development in wound dressing is entirely due to this need, i.e. the search for optimal methods of treatment.

It should be said that although the choice of dressings in the past was not stunningly diverse, our ancestors showed amazing creativity in this area. Thus, the wounds were disinfected with wine or vinegar, covered with plantain or burdock leaves, and even covered with tar (which resulted in the formation of the so-called occlusive dressing).

We will not know which of these wound management methods was the most effective and the least painful for the patient. We will also not find out what the patients themselves thought about such treatment. Unfortunately, we do not have statistics on how many lives were saved thanks to burdock leaves, how many thanks to tar, and how many thanks to other such inventions.

In the world of the heroes of the Sienkiewicz trilogy, the most effective dressing for cuts and gunshot wounds was kneaded bread with cobwebs. Thanks to this technology, Zagłoba saved Bohun, who had been cut in a duel by Wołodyjowski, and Kiemlicze saved Kmicic, shot by prince Bogusław Radziwiłł.

Disputes about whether or not a spider's thread actually has germicidal properties continue even today. Some scientists claim that there are special fungi in spider's web that can grow with the help of bread and thus produce penicillin. There is also a theory that spider's web is an ideal dressing for burn wounds, and it also stops bleeding thanks to the substances it contains: pyrrolidine* responsible for the general level of hydration of the thread, potassium hydrogen phosphate* which regulates acidity and prevents the growth of fungi and bacteria, and nitrate potassium* which inhibits the growth of the bacterial flora.

There are also numerous opponents of this method - they claim that it is a myth and the use of a spider web does not give any positive therapeutic effects, and is even dangerous to health and incompatible with hygiene, because the mere "removal of sticks and debris visible to the naked eye before applying it to the wound” does not make the spider dressing biologically safe.

One thing is certain, at the moment we do not employ spiders to produce this, perhaps a valuable raw material for the production of dressings, and we are not working on the efficiency of their work. Although, who knows what the future will bring.

However, in return, we have a huge selection of dressings in the form of membranes, foams, powder or gel, which we apply to the surface of shallow wounds, pour inside deeper wounds, or pour over dry wounds - depending on what we expect from the dressing or what kind of wound we have to deal with: a light wound, which we can easily treat at home, using, for example, a plaster; or a chronic wound, the healing of which requires much more effort, knowledge and more specialized dressing materials.

Currently, many spiders could envy intelligent dressing materials containing beneficial active substances which, like small computers, manage infection, exudate, do not require frequent changes or are even resorbable, i.e. they can dissolve spontaneously in the wound after a certain time; dressings that adjust to the anatomy of the patient's body form the so-called "Second skin".

Today, Bohun and Kmicic would use an absorbent dressing material with chitosan and silver. And the spider would sleep peacefully in the corner.

Bibliography:
*biomolecula.ru