Henry Drysdale Dakin

Who was Henry Drysdale Dakin?

Henry Drysdale Dakin FRS was an English chemist.

He was born in London as the youngest of 8 children to a family of steel merchants from Leeds. As a school boy he did water analysis with the Leeds City Analyst. He studied chemistry at the University of Leeds with Julius B. Cohen and after he worked with Albrecht Kossel on arginase at the University of Heidelberg he joined Columbia University in 1905, working in the lab of Christian Herter. During his work on amino acids he obtained his PhD from Leeds.

In 1914 he went back to England to offer his service with the war effort. Due to a request for a chemist by Alexis Carrel to the Rockefeller Institute, Dakin joined Carrel in 1916 at a temporary hospital in Compiègne. There they developed the Carrel–Dakin method of wound treatments. This consisted of intermittently irrigating the wound with Dakin's solution. This solution is a highly diluted antiseptic, consisting of sodium hypochlorite and boric acid. It is unstable and deteriorates within a six hours, and must be made as needed. Since 1982 a modified, more stable Dakin's Solution has been commercially available from Century Pharmaceuticals, Inc.