Monitoring moisture without disturbing the wound dressing

The concept of moist wound healing (MWH) is relatively new. It was possibly first espoused by John Bull and his co-workers (1948), and later demonstrated experimentally by George Winter (1962) and Howard Maibach (Hinman and Maibach, 1963). While these studies were conducted on experimental, acute wounds in animals (domestic pigs) and humans, their results have subsequently been interpreted as being representative of all wound healing situations. MWH is now accepted as useful in wound care (Dyson et al, 1988; Bryan, 2004; Van Rijswijk, 2004), based upon the evidence that cell proliferation and migration (notably of keratinocytes in re-epithelialisation) is facilitated by a moist environment.