Tag Archives: 1865

12 August 1865

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Joseph Lister performs 1st antiseptic surgery.

On the 12th August 1865 Joseph Lister carried out the world’s first antiseptic surgery using the chemical phenol, otherwise known as carbolic acid. Lister is remembered among the greats of medical science for being the first person to identify the link between clean hospital conditions and infection rates.

To understand the importance of Lister’s achievement, it’s important to remember that in the 19th Century up to 50% of all hospital patients died of infection. This often occurred after surgery, during which time patients developed ‘ward fever’ – a non-specific range of secondary infections caused through poor hospital hygiene where surgeons weren’t required to wash their hands or even their stained operating gowns.

Having read the work of the Frenchman Louis Pasteur regarding the spread and growth of bacteria, Lister became interested in finding a way to remove infection-causing micro-organisms from hospitals. Germ theory of disease was only just becoming more widely accepted, but after discovering that carbolic acid, now referred to as phenol, had successfully been used to reduce the smell of raw sewage Lister began experiments using it as what became termed an ‘antiseptic’.

On the 12th August Lister used a piece of lint covered in carbolic acid to cover the compound fracture wound of a seven-year-old boy, and found that over a period of six weeks the wound healed without developing gangrene. Developments in surgical hygiene followed. As well as surgeons wearing gloves, they began to wash their hands in carbolic acid, as well as washing their instruments in Lister’s 5% solution and spraying it liberally around the operating theatre.

27 July 1865

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Welsh settlers to settle in Chubut in Argentina.

The first group of settlers, nearly 200 people gathered from all over Wales, but mainly north and mid-Wales, sailed from Liverpool in late May 1865 aboard the tea-clipper Mimosa. Blessed with good weather the journey took approximately eight weeks, and the Mimosa eventually arrived at what is now called Puerto Madryn on 27th July.

Unfortunately the settlers found that Patagonia was not the friendly and inviting land they had been expecting. They had been told that it was much like the green and fertile lowlands of Wales. In reality it was a barren and inhospitable windswept pampas, with no water, very little food and no forests to provide building materials for shelter. Some of the settlers’ first homes were dug out from the soft rock of the cliffs in the bay.

Teheulche nativesDespite receiving help from the native Teheulche Indians who tried to teach the settlers how to survive on the scant resources of the prairie, the colony looked as if it were doomed to failure from the lack of food. However, after receiving several mercy missions of supplies, the settlers persevered and finally struggled on to reach the proposed site for the colony in the Chubut valley about 40 miles away. It was here, where a river the settlers named Camwy cuts a narrow channel through the desert from the nearby Andes, that the first permanent settlement of Rawson was established at the end of 1865.

The colony suffered badly in the early years with floods, poor harvests and disagreements over the ownership of land, in addition the lack of a direct route to the ocean made it difficult to bring in new supplies.

History records that it was one Rachel Jenkins who first had the idea that changed the history of the colony and secured its future. Rachel had noticed that on occasion the River Camwy burst its banks; she also considered how such flooding brought life to the arid land that bordered it. It was simple irrigation and backbreaking water management that saved the Chubut valley and its tiny band of Welsh settlers.

Over the next several years new settlers arrived from both Wales and Pennsylvania, and by the end of 1874 the settlement had a population totalling over 270. With the arrival of these keen and fresh hands, new irrigation channels were dug along the length of the Chubut valley, and a patchwork of farms began to emerge along a thin strip on either side of the River Camwy.

In 1875 the Argentine government granted the Welsh settlers official title to the land, and this encouraged many more people to join the colony, with more than 500 people arriving from Wales, including many from the south Wales coalfields which were undergoing a severe depression at that time. This fresh influx of immigrants meant that plans for a major new irrigation system in the Lower Chubut valley could finally begin.

There were further substantial migrations from Wales during the periods 1880-87, and also 1904-12, again mainly due to depression within the coalfields. The settlers had seemingly achieved their utopia with Welsh speaking schools and chapels; even the language of local government was Welsh.

In the few decades since the settlers had arrived, they had transformed the inhospitable scrub-filled semi-dessert into one of the most fertile and productive agricultural areas in the whole of Argentina, and had even expanded their territory into the foothills of the Andes with a settlement known as Cwm Hyfryd.

But it was these productive and fertile lands that now attracted other nationalities to settle in Chubut and the colony’s Welsh identity began to be eroded. By 1915 the population of Chubut had grown to around 20,000, with approximately half of these being foreign immigrants.

24 December 1865

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The Ku Klux Klan is formed.

The white supremacist group was founded on December 24th, 1865.

In the hood: two members of the Ku Klux Klan, c.1870

The war between the States ended in 1865 with the North victorious and the Confederate South defeated. Slavery in the South was now illegal, the former slaves had the vote and groups of white Republicans started collecting batches of them and escorting them to the polls. The situation was resented and small white terrorist groups formed at various places to keep the blacks down and white supremacy intact. Far the best known would be the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan began in Tennessee, in the small town of Pulaski, near Memphis. It was founded by Confederate army veterans at a drinking club there and the strange but memorable name was a combination of ‘clan’ and the Greek word kuklos, meaning ‘circle’ or, in this case, social club. Dressed up in scary costumes with hoods and masks, members rode about at night threatening and frightening blacks. They demanded that blacks either vote Democrat or not vote at all. They met defiance with beatings, whippings and sometimes murder. They burned blacks’ houses down and drove black farmers off their land and they extended their hostilities to southern whites who opposed them and the so-called ‘carpetbaggers’, white infiltrators from the North.

The Klan loved weird titles, Grand Dragon and such, and a former Confederate cavalry general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, is said to have been for a time the Klan’s leader as Grand Imperial Wizard. In 1868 he said that the Klan had well over 500,000 members in the southern states, but that he was not involved.

The original Klan faded away in the 1870s after the federal government had taken action and many members had been arrested and punished, but it had helped to make the South a Democrat political stronghold. It was refounded in 1915, inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation by the pioneering Hollywood director D.W. Griffith, which shone an admiring light on the original Klan. It has existed with very slowly declining influence ever since.

24 December 1865

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The Ku Klux Klan is formed.

On this day in history, six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee created the original Ku Klux Klan. The name was formed by combining the Greek word for circle kyklos with clan. The group was known for a short time as the “Kuklux Clan”.

The Klan began as a “Christian” social club of like-minded individuals, quickly evolving into an action society dedicated to “demonstrating” its opposition to blacks later expanded to Jews, immigrants, Communists, gays and lesbians and, until recently, Catholics. The Klan is still active, and was estimated in 2012 to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members. It is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

More recently, the fortunes of the Klan seem to have been revived by the successful presidential race of Donald Trump. David Duke, longtime Klan leader, neo-Nazi, and international spokesman for Holocaust denial, claimed  credit in part for Trump’s win, tweeting “make no mistake about it, our people played a HUGE role in electing Trump!”

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