Effect of Air Exposure and Occlusion on Experimental Human Skin Wounds

THE benefits of special dressings versus air exposure of cutaneous wounds has long been debated. Winter and Scales1,2 have recently added fresh insight into the problem. In the domestic pig they demonstrated that an occlusive dressing doubles the rate of wound re-epithelization when compared with wounds exposed to the air. In this communication we report parallel studies performed in man.