G'day again Ebbie,

Whoops - l'esprit de l'escalier strikes again:

As I sent the last posting, I remembered what may have been muddled up with the superglue/artificial suture story. For a long time back, collodion - a liquid form of nitrocellulose - was used as a wound dressing ... possibly before WWI. I had this applied to a head wound (domestic ... a lead sinker being spun by my older brother, on a fishing line that broke ... struck the side of my head) around 1954.

The most familiar (if unknown!) use of collodion was in Hollywood movies where the clear solution was used to trace out facial scars, in horror films and such. As it dried, it shrank, puckering up the flesh like scar tissue. This was also a prank of apprentices in the printing industry, where they used the photographic collodion process as late as the early 1960s. They would draw horroble scars onto their faces before going out to lunch and enjoy the horrified looks of passers by.

This use may have been mistaken for the later alpha cyano-acrylate incision sealant.

Regards,

Bob Bolton