Appeal No. 97-0747
Application 08/443,258
In essence, the appellants’ position on appeal is that the examiner’s rejections are unsound
because the prior art relied upon by the examiner to support the rejections would not have suggested,
and in fact teaches away from, the attachment of a cuff to a surgical gown via a single ply portion of the
cuff. In this regard, the appellants submit that Neckerman’s cuffs are attached
to their respective gowns at the two-ply back section and that this deficiency in the examiner’s primary
reference is not cured by the secondary references.
This line of argument is fatally flawed with respect to representative claim 26, however, because
this claim does not require the step of attaching a cuff to a surgical gown via a single ply cuff portion.
More particularly, claim 26 recites a method for fabricating a surgical gown comprising, inter
alia, the steps of (1) fabricating a pair of annular cuff blanks, with the fabricating of each blank
comprising circularly-knitting a fabric tube having a main cuff body portion of a single ply knitted
construction terminating at an outer end of the cuff in an integral turned welt forming a finished cuff
edge, and (2) affixing each annular cuff blank to a respective one of the sleeves of the gown in
surrounding relation to the respective wrist opening thereof for conforming to the wearer’s wrists.
These two steps find full response in Neckerman’s steps of (1) circularly-knitting plural cuffs, each of
which has a single-ply middle section (i.e., a main body portion) 14 and a two-ply front section (i.e., an
integral turned welt) 12 and (2) attaching a pair of the cuffs to the sleeves of a surgical gown (see Figure
4
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