antisepsis

Since busy people can't wash all the time, a device like the one in the article would make antisepsis a lot harder to resist.

The antisepsis of staged fight scenes on TV make it seem like any well-trained person can recover from a tussle and be back to normal by the next scene. In the real world, it only takes seconds for a struggle to turn fatal, even discarding the presence of any other weapons.

Three cheers for for antisepsis, antibiotics, and anesthetic!

That may be so, but they had antisepsis, vaccination and the germ theory of disease in the 1920s and 1930s ... and it still didn't save them from losing as many people to fulminating bacterial infections as we lose to cancer today.

Yes, there is the imperceptible benefit of a slight reduction in the probability of death, but a recent New Yorker article pointed out that antisepsis was slow to be adopted because the benefits were not as easily measurable -- in contrast, anesthesia, invented at the same time, was adopted worldwide almost instantly. I personally would only buy a driverless car if it meant I could immediately get where I am going twice as fast.