Caroline Hampton Halsted: The First to Use Rubber Gloves in the Operating Room

aroline Hampton was the niece of Confederate General Wade Hampton III, who was later governor of South Carolina and a US senator (Figure 1a).Caroline was born at Woodlands, adjacent to Millwood, Hampton's plantation home near Columbia, South Carolina.Her mother, Sally Baxter of New York (Figure 1c), died of tuberculosis at age 29 in 1862 and her father, Colonel Frank Hampton (Figure 1b), Wade's younger brother, was killed 9 months later at the Battle of Brandy Station in Virginia.Millwood was burned by Sherman's troops in February 1865, and Caroline was raised by her three aunts (the Hampton sisters) in a small house behind the ruins of Millwood (Figure 2).In 1885, Caroline rebelled against her family and entered nursing school in New York City, graduating from New York Hospital in 1888 (Figure 3).When the Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in 1889, she moved to Baltimore and was appointed chief nurse of the operating room by the famous surgeon Dr. William Halsted (Figure 4).