Hodges Sarah
a History Department , University of Warwick , Coventry , UK.
Anthropol Med. 2017 Dec;24(3):319-333. doi: 10.1080/13648470.2017.1389165.
Over the course of the twentieth century, as hospitals cleaned up, they came to produce more and more rubbish. Beginning in the 1970s and gaining pace in the 1980s and 1990s, single-use plastic items (syringes, blood bags, tubing) saturated everyday medical practice across the globe. This essay brings the question of plastic to bear upon the longer history of twentieth century sanitary science. The widespread adoption of single-use disposable medical plastics consolidated a century's worth of changes in medical hygiene. As strange as it may seem today, the initial uptake of medical plastics was not driven primarily by concerns about hygiene. Plastic began as a mid-century technology of convenience and durability. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that it morphed into a powerful symbol and instrument of medical hygiene. Today, both patients and practitioners have embraced plastic as an indispensable technology of clean medicine. The procession of single-use medical plastics through everyday medicine now comprises a constant, if disposable, infrastructure of medical hygiene. This new processional infrastructure of disposable hygiene has produced another, albeit unintended, consequence. This new regime has exponentially increased hospitals' material outputs. In so doing, plastic has refigured the ecologies of everyday medicine. Plastic hygiene has rendered hospitals factories of medical garbage.
在20世纪，随着医院环境的改善，它们产生的垃圾越来越多。从20世纪70年代开始，一次性塑料制品（注射器、血袋、导管）在全球日常医疗实践中普及，并在80年代和90年代加速增长。本文将塑料问题置于20世纪卫生科学的漫长历史背景中进行探讨。一次性医疗塑料的广泛采用巩固了一个世纪以来医疗卫生领域的变革。尽管如今看来可能很奇怪，但医疗塑料最初的应用并非主要出于卫生方面的考虑。塑料起初是一种在本世纪中叶出现的兼具便利性和耐用性的技术。直到20世纪末，它才演变成医疗卫生的一个强大象征和工具。如今，患者和从业者都已将塑料视为清洁医疗中不可或缺的技术。一次性医疗塑料在日常医疗中的使用如今已构成了医疗卫生领域持续存在（尽管是一次性的）的基础设施。这种一次性卫生的新的流程化基础设施产生了另一个虽非本意但却出现的后果。这种新体制使医院的物质产出呈指数级增长。这样一来，塑料重塑了日常医疗的生态。塑料卫生已使医院变成了医疗垃圾工厂。
