Remembering Letitia Mumford Geer, the Nurse Who Invented the One-Handed Syringe

Medical treatments were hit or miss in the Victorian Era. Some of the suggested treatments are questionable by modern standards: The first-ever Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy recommended such remedies as arsenic, leeches, and cocaine for a variety of ailments.

But the era was also a period of innovation in the medical field. Many procedures and instruments developed in the late 1800s are still used by medical professionals today, including the one-handed, self-administered syringe.

When Letitia Mumford Geer secured her patent for the device in 1899—the same year the Merck Manual was released—she changed healthcare from that point forward. Geer was born in New York in 1852, a year before the invention of a hypodermic needle sharp enough to pierce a patient’s skin and administer intravenous treatment at the same time.

Syringes had already been around for a surprisingly long time by that point in history. In the 1st century CE, the Roman surgeon Galen first described a rudimentary piston syringe designed to apply ointments rather than inject fluids into the bloodstream. By 900 CE, the Arab Muslim ophthalmologist Ammar al-Mawsil was using syringes to extract cataracts from the eyes of his patients. The instrument wasn’t sharp like modern needles, and it required an incision to be made in the person’s eye ahead of time. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 19th century that syringes resembling what’s used today—with hypodermic needles, plungers, and glass bodies for easy measuring—spread throughout the world of medicine. 

When Geer became a nurse in adulthood, she would have been acquainted with the tool. The updated versions were much easier to use than the more cumbersome iterations that came before them, but still, she saw room for improvement.