Harnessing the Healing Art of Thread

Frieze has posted an informative and intriguing article abou the intersections between thread and medicine. The piece opens with some crowd-sourced responses to getting PPP into the hands of healthcare workers - to which my first reaction is incredulity that a publication originating in the UK and focused also on a US (and Western European?) audience, aka the richest and most technologically advanced civilizations the world has ever seen, is reporting on our reliance on homemade protective gear to fight the most significant “attack” our world has ever experienced.

But I digress. The article goes on to talk about threads and sutures - I’ve copied a paragraph below. I have just finished Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, in which she reminds me that the word suture has the same origin as sutra (as in the ancient Buddhist texts) and is the palm leaf on which the texts were written. So there is a straight line between spiritualism and the word and healing and thread and today. I’ll write more on this in another post.

For now, here is a paragraph from the Frieze article:

Textiles can be at the forefront of research into disease prevention: a recently invented ‘virus-killing’ snood, made from carbon cloth and cotton, has the capacity to trap 96 percent of airborne viruses. This relationship between textiles and medicine has an ancient lineage, with the surgical sutures fundamental to healing the human body first chronicled in an Ancient Egyptian text dating to 1,600 BCE. Plant and animal fibres such as wool, linen, cotton and silk have all been used for surgical suture throughout history and, while the majority of medical materials are now synthetic, silk can still be used, with a 2006 study focussing on the benefits of spider silk. Even the most advanced surgical developments rely on an understanding of threads, including yarn grown from human skins cells which can be knitted, woven or even crocheted to heal wounds.