“All right. Tell me what we've got. Make it quick.”
“Almost no blood.” “In a bad way.?”
“Yeah, in a bad way.” “Let's do it.”
“Wait a second. Something's off. This room..it's not green.”
You know, it's funny you mentioned that. “Who are you?”
I tracked down the real story behind operating room green, and I found the obsessed surgeon
who actually battled— “Is this a kidney?”
“Oh, that doesn't look nearly juicy enough.” The story of operating room green
is richer than I ever realized. It includes a lot more spinach too,
and it made me rethink my entire attitude toward medicine. “Ignore him. We are not
gonna let some guy making a YouTube video keep us from saving this man's life.”
I am gonna let them work back there because I am not so good with blood.
You know, when I started this video, it never occurred to me that I would have to
look at hundreds of photos of surgery. I'm gonna censor the surgeries in this video,
so don't worry. You won't see anything too traumatizing. I mean, this story itself,
it could be simple. Just Google it. “Green is well suited to help doctors see better
in the operating room because it is the exact opposite of red on the color wheel.”
This is true and sort of the answer, so feel free to click on something else.
But I think you need the context and the details to really understand this story and
to see the genius of a green operating room. Let's just start with a tour of terrifying
old surgical photos. This looks like the type of hazing where a fraternity might even say,
oh, that's kind of unreasonable. This is a beautiful use of wood paneling
to…disembowel somebody. These guys look perfectly dressed for, I don't know, a Jane Austen novel,
not so much surgery. By 1900, you were starting to see the industry slowly professionalize. This
was an operating theater, but you had gowns here and you know, an actual dress code.
But here's the thing: everything's white. Makes sense. Purity. Cleanliness, 1901. White, 1906,
still white, 1911, also white. These windows are both a solution and a problem. They give
crucial light for operations, but surgeons have to operate on a sun based schedule,
and there's a lot of glare that comes from the white floors and white walls.
Something had to change.
“He’s got almost no juice.” I wanna do a deep dive here on the journal
article that changed everything. This right here is a surgeon named Dr. Harry Mitchell Sherman,
and he was a big deal in California. I found some pictures of a plaque for Harry Mitchell
Sherman. This was for establishing the first University of California hospital in 1907.
He had mainstream medical achievements like this heart suture article. But today he's probably best
known for this article about the Green Operating Room at St. Luke's Hospital. Now, if you're a
reader of the modern hospital like moi, then you know that this was already a thing. When Sherman
wrote his article, this 1914 article stated the big problem: “when his eyes tire for a moment
and he's trying to see with his fingers, he looks away from the field for an instance eye’s rest.
White ceiling, white furniture, nothing on which his tired eye may rest except
white. White emphasized with the glare from the windows.”
I'm gonna give you a dramatic rendition of this: Ah! Ah!. Thank you.
Hospitals were already starting to use lead colored sheeting or crucially green. And Dr.
Harry Sherman made the strongest case for a green operating room.
Later that year, he described performing a cleft palate surgery and having trouble seeing
into a child's mouth with white sheeting around it. The glare was too much for it,
and this is where the spinach comes in. “The color scheme, it seemed to me should
start from the red of the blood and of the tissues. Therefore, I advised that green,
the complementary color to red, should be chosen. It was found to be the green of the spinach leaf.”
But that is not it. This is where I actually want to dig in further, 'cause the science behind this,
it is extremely vibes-based. First, he's like, “the iron in the
chlorophyll of spinach is the same chemical combination as the iron in hemoglobin.”
This was a highly respected doctor making the the hemoglobin connection.
Sherman goes on to say that green is good because it's similar to green bushes, which echoes
our natural selection. So he's saying that when people were hunting and gathering, running around,
there were lots of green bushes in the distance, and so natural selection selected for them.
And now that's the reason that they should have green operating rooms, which,
you know, I, I guess that's, that's medicine. Then he is like, yeah, I tried green toweling,
but, uh, super-heated steam, that washed it out. So I switched to black sheets and everything,
and so that meant that this was what you saw when you first came out of surgery.
That is terrifying.
Then, just to top it off, he goes on this whole rant about how newspapers should be
in white letters on black pages instead of white pages with black letters. Just like,
yeah, sure. That's a good point. Alright, go ahead and cut. Open my chest now, doctor.
But despite his crazy theories, he wasn't alone in seeing the practical appeal of green.
In England in 1915, they also started using a green background for the operation area 'cause
it was a restful color. This matches with the color theory of the time that repeatedly said
that green was a restful color. On a scientific legitimacy scale of crystals to clinical trials,
I'm gonna give this a, “my shin bone hurts, so it's gonna rain later today.”
It doesn't matter. He's less nuts than the all white surgical room advocates,
'cause he kind of has a point. There was a defense of white operating rooms in Modern
Hospital in 1917. And boy was it silly, the doctor, he suggested amber-tinted
spectacles to shield against the glare. And this is the best part: caps with beaks.
Imagine your surgeon wearing glasses and a giant cap, 'cause he's constantly being blinded.
Sherman actively fought against this for his green operating room. And he was pretty
influential. He was even a leading member of the very new American College of Surgeons.
In 1918, he wrote a rebuttal to the white operating room guy, and he pulled no punches.
He also mentions that he sent reprints of the paper to his many technical journals
and magazines as asked for them so that the plan might have the widest publicity. And I
even found a copy of American Architect that he sent out to a medical lab promoting his green
operating room plan and it works. In 1921, Modern Hospital was plugging green operating rooms.
Architects quickly followed suit when it came to “color in the modern hospital.”
Artificial lighting like this awesome looking light,
it meant that the glare issue became mainstream as surgery changed from daylight-dependent to
an artificially lit profession. Color consultants leapt onto it.
The most famous said that it had a special value in surgery and promoted blue-green.
By the 1950s, I was finding tons of newspaper articles that were promoting the green, green,
too. All because of a doctor who liked the properties of spinach.
“Did you forget to put the organs back?” “So I am gonna put these right back, like,
like yesterday. Do not worry about the organs.”
So why bother to tell this story? I mean, some operating rooms,
they're different colors now and you know, maybe there's some science now
that says that green or blue-green really is better for surgeons.
This is a helpful way for regular joes like, you know, like me to think about
medicine not just as a science, but also as a practice. This opinion showed up in that
first 1914 editorial that recommended getting rid of the white operating room. “Is not the
surgeon also a workman and is not his work about as important as any we can think of?”
This right here, it is not Sherman's only plaque. He has a tribute on every hospital wall.
Hey, that is it for this one. Thank you so much for watching. Uh, I, I just wanna close a loop on
the end of the video there. Um, that guy they were operating on, do not worry, he is dead.
Um, yeah, he is out of his misery. If you haven't been here before,
this is a personal channel where I post, uh, personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
I'm gonna take a moment to brag here and say that the, uh, first Modern Hospital
editorial that I put in this video, that's the earliest mention I've seen anywhere
of the idea of a green operating room, including a bunch of academic papers. So,
I'll put the link to that in the description. Check it out.
I'll also have a reaction video up on Patreon. It's a great place to like support this channel
and research into important topics like operating room hues and colors. And otherwise I will see
you in the next one. But you know what? You, you go to the hardware store today.
You know that wall in your hallway that's always looked, looked a little bit off.
You get some spinach paint. You, you let your eyes rest. Okay? Yeah. Bye-bye.