The importance of the Band-Aid

Alexandria, Virginia

Back in February, the first grader sustained a scrape that left a tiny red dot on her leg. She requested a soft cast and a medevac chopper. She settled for a dollar-store bandage. She shouldn’t have: it turns out she was quietly bleeding to death from the inside. She would have continued to deteriorate had we not been alarmed by a toilet clog the week after she fell.

The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by one Earle Dickson, a New Jersey cotton buyer with a clumsy wife. All her cooking mishaps inspired her exhausted husband to combine his stock with the methacrylates of surgical tape and some crinoline fabric found in petticoats. The J&J website can’t help but note that Mr. Dickson is enshrined in the National Inventors Hall of Fame “in the ranks of fellow innovators like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell”; the identity of the traveling salesman who first suggested the company supply the Boy Scouts of America with customized first aid kits remains lost to history.

The Boy Scout partnership kept the adhesive bandage around while J&J executives awaited the next world war, which is always useful in the wound-repair industry. The Band-Aid was cemented in the American consumer consciousness even before J&J plastered Mickey Mouse on to the crinoline fabric in 1951. The marketing strategy lives on. Baby registries are now littered with elaborate first aid kits, complete with all manner of bandages and thermometers.

The overprepared father quickly learns that all these products are useless with the exception of the nasal aspirator, which you can slip in your pocket when the delivery room nurses turn their backs – a wholly unnecessary act of rebellion that nevertheless takes the sting out of the five-figure bill to come. Nearly every ailment you’ll encounter in the opening months of life can be soothed by pouring breast milk on it, a miraculous panacea for treating seasonal colds, thrush, pinkeye and eczema. It does everything that your wife’s essential-oil-peddling-friend promised when she presented her gift at the baby shower. So effective is mother’s milk it would probably cure Covid, too, if that ailment weren’t designed in a lab to spare children.

You learn triage as a child grows. During your residency as battlefield medic-cum-surgeon, you are taught to memorize the phrase, “tough girl, brush off.” You will recite these words to the patient while slapping your hands together in as goofy a manner as possible.

The procedure is suitable for treating any injury short of compound fracture and chronic traumatic encephalopathy; in the event of either case, repeat the phrase while throwing in a healthy dose of laughter to distract from your ashen face. When these remedies fall short, a mother’s kiss and quick cuddle should suffice.

The stockpiling of bandaging and peroxide is nevertheless inevitable. There will come a day when your child asks you to “kiss it better” as she gestures to a moderate case of diaper rash. These cases are rare, for the majority of children self-wean from mother’s kisses just as they once did from mother’s milk – particularly once they notice that no amount of tender caresses and cooing can tuck that tibia back beneath the skin, and frankly, the wound is beginning to smell. It’s off to the drug store to begin your next chapter.

The first officially designated ticker-tape parade occurred in lower Manhattan in 1919, the year before Dickson debuted his invention in suburban New Jersey. He couldn’t have known that he was about to transform the life of every parent in America. Our hardwood floors are awash with discarded plastic and resin and once-sterile fabric, an annoyance that takes on a more sinister turn with a crawler roaming the halls. I cannot recall how many used Band-Aids and their individual wrappers we’ve removed from an infant’s mouth.

The graduation from boo-boo kisses to Band-Aids is one of the most underappreciated milestones in a child’s development, but it is a vital one for any father. You get to see firsthand the idiocy with which they exercise independence. There is no better argument against Whig history and Rousseau’s license than witnessing the application of an 8”x4” piece of gauze to a pinprick, the Neosporin-soaked wrapper tossed casually to the ground. You’d conjure Dr. Johnson and dispute it with a kick, but that would mean retrieving another oversized Band-Aid necessary to avoid the attention of CPS.

Parades always come to a disappointing end. The once enthusiastic flow of ticker tape recedes. Boo-boos will become the mere stuff of biology, to be clinically corrected rather than cooed over. You can’t help but notice in those sterile environs that even a blood transfusion appears bloodless, and it strikes you that there will come a day when your hardwood floor is just hardwood. And dust.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.