A huck is a cotton towel used throughout hospitals, especially in operating rooms. Short for “huckaback,” the name refers to a specific weave pattern that gives the towel a distinctive texture and high absorbency. You’ll find huck towels in surgical suites, exam rooms, and supply closets across nearly every hospital department.
What Makes a Huck Towel Different
Huck towels get their name from the huckaback weave, a centuries-old textile technique originally developed for the linen trade. In this weave, lengthwise threads float over the crosswise threads at fixed intervals, creating a pattern of small raised squares or rectangles on the surface. The result is a waffle-like texture that pulls moisture away quickly and holds onto it.
Most hospital huck towels are made from 100% cotton with a fabric weight around 300 GSM (grams per square meter), which makes them thick enough to absorb large amounts of liquid but still easy to fold and stack. The weave itself has two main variants. The ordinary huckaback is the most common, while a double-weft version historically called “Devon huck” or “medical huck” produces a denser, heavier cloth specifically designed for clinical settings.
How Hospitals Use Huck Towels
In the operating room, huck towels serve several roles at once. Surgical staff use them for hand drying after scrubbing in. They’re layered on back tables and mayo stands (the metal trays that hold instruments during a procedure) to create a clean, absorbent work surface. Nurses also roll instruments inside huck towels to keep them organized and protected during transport or storage.
Outside the OR, huck towels show up in patient care areas for general wiping and drying, and environmental services teams use them for surface cleaning. Their texture makes them effective at picking up moisture and residue from hard surfaces without leaving streaks, which is why they’ve remained a hospital staple even as disposable alternatives have become available.
Why Lint Matters in Surgery
One of the most important qualities of any towel used in an operating room is how much lint it sheds. Loose fibers that fall into a surgical site can trigger inflammatory reactions in tissue. The huckaback weave holds its fibers more tightly than a standard terry cloth towel, which is one reason hospitals adopted it in the first place.
That said, cotton huck towels aren’t completely lint-free. For procedures where even minimal fiber contamination is a concern, some hospitals have shifted to synthetic low-lint towels designed to reduce airborne particulates in the OR. These disposable options are made from materials engineered to shed fewer particles than cotton. Many hospitals keep both on hand, choosing between them based on the situation.
Reusable vs. Disposable Huck Towels
Hospitals use both reusable and disposable versions. Reusable huck towels are laundered and sterilized between uses, typically processed through the hospital’s central sterile supply department. When they need to be sterile for surgical use, they go through an autoclave, a machine that uses high-pressure steam to kill microorganisms. The exact temperature, time, and pressure settings follow the manufacturer’s instructions for both the towel and the sterilizer, and each load is monitored with chemical indicators to confirm sterilization was successful.
Disposable huck towels skip the laundering step entirely. They’re used once and discarded, which eliminates the risk of inadequate sterilization and reduces laundry costs. The tradeoff is the ongoing expense of buying replacements and the environmental impact of single-use products. Hospitals weigh these factors differently depending on their budget, sustainability goals, and infection control priorities.
Where You’ll Encounter Them
If you’re a patient, you probably won’t notice huck towels directly. They’re part of the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of a hospital, the kind of supply that surgical techs grab from a shelf without a second thought. But they’re everywhere: folded in sterile packs for the OR, stacked on carts in hallways, and tucked into procedure rooms. The simple cotton rectangle with the bumpy texture has been a fixture in hospitals for well over a century, and despite newer alternatives, it remains one of the most commonly used textiles in healthcare.