Before the Hollow Needle
People have long understood the idea of pushing fluid through a tube. Ancient writers described syringes for flushing wounds and ears, and for giving enemas, and simple bulb and piston devices were used in medicine for centuries. What was missing was a way to deliver a measured amount of a substance beneath the skin or into a vein.
In the 1650s, experiments in England, including work associated with Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, injected liquids such as wine, ale or opium solutions into the veins of animals using a quill or bladder attached to a pointed tube. They are often cited as the earliest recorded intravenous injections. These were scientific curiosities rather than treatment, and attempts to inject humans in the following years, including early blood transfusions, ended badly in several cases and fell out of favor for a long time.
The Mid-Nineteenth Century Convergence
Several people worked on hollow needles and syringes in the 1840s and 1850s:
- Francis Rynd, an Irish physician in Dublin, is credited with using a hollow needle in 1844 to inject a solution of morphine near a nerve to treat neuralgia. His device used gravity to let the liquid flow.
- Alexander Wood, a physician in Edinburgh, described a syringe with a fine hollow needle and a glass barrel in 1853, which he used to give morphine for pain.
- Charles Gabriel Pravaz, a French surgeon in Lyon, developed a syringe at about the same time, partly for injecting substances into blood vessels or aneurysms to cause clotting.
Credit is often shared. The term hypodermic comes from Greek roots meaning under the skin, and the word came into use in this era. It is unusual for an invention to have two clear names attached at once, and historians generally say that the syringe appeared from the combination of a fine, hollow needle and a piston syringe, an idea that was ready for more than one inventor.
Making the Needle Possible
The hollow needle depended on metalworking. Drawing and finishing a thin, sharp, hollow tube was difficult and expensive, and early needles were made of materials such as silver or gold, then steel. Wire drawing and tube-making techniques improved during the nineteenth century, allowing finer and more consistent needles. Glass barrels allowed users to see how much liquid was being drawn up, and later graduated markings helped measure doses.
Slow Adoption
The syringe did not immediately take over. Many physicians preferred other methods of giving medicines, such as by mouth, and the number of useful injectable drugs was small at first. Morphine, whose effect is quick when injected, was the main early example. As morphine and other drugs came into regular use, concerns grew about dependence and misuse, and this is part of the early history of the device, although the details and the stories about specific individuals are not always well documented.
Wider adoption came as drug choices expanded. Local anesthetics such as cocaine in the 1880s and later less hazardous agents, along with antitoxins in the 1890s, such as the diphtheria antitoxin, encouraged physicians to inject. Subcutaneous and intramuscular injections became routine in hospitals around the turn of the twentieth century.
Sterility and Standardization
Early syringes were reused without much thought, and infection at the injection site was a recognized problem. As ideas about antiseptic surgery spread, practitioners began to boil syringes and needles, and all-glass syringes that could withstand heating became popular in the early twentieth century. Standard fittings such as the Luer taper made it easier to match needles and barrels from different manufacturers.
Even so, reusable glass syringes sterilized between patients had disadvantages: they broke, they took time to clean and a lapse in sterilization could carry infection. Disposable plastic syringes and needles, designed to be used once, were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, and became standard in many countries through the later twentieth century. Health organizations later promoted single-use and safety-engineered designs as a way to reduce accidental needle injuries and reuse.
What Injection Made Possible
The syringe supported several major medical developments. The insulin discovery of the 1920s created treatment that depends on injection, and vaccine programs, including the later polio vaccine, used syringes widely, though some vaccines were delivered by other routes. Blood sampling, intravenous fluids and local anesthesia are among the many other applications. Today, injection technology continues to change with pen devices, auto-injectors and implantable drug pumps.
This article describes how the instrument developed, not how to use one. Injection carries risks, and any medical use should be left to trained professionals.