160 CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE 



Crimean War 10 "one could recognize at a distance a 

 surgical hospital owing to the stench of the human putrid- 

 ity it contained." In the surgical wards, "no matter how 

 well ventilated, there was a fetid sickening odor" up to 

 the days of Lister himself, wrote Sir Hector Cameron, 

 Lister's house surgeon in Glasgow. Death always stalked 

 grimly behind the surgeon. 



Secondary hemorrhage, tetanus, erysipelas, septice- 

 mia, pyemia and hospital gangrene were never all 

 absent . . . and at times pyemia and hospital gan- 

 grene became alarmingly epidemic. 11 



After vividly describing the ravages of hospital gan- 

 grene Bell then vehemently asks : 



What, then, is the surgeon to do? Is he to try 

 experiments with ointments and plasters while the 

 men are dying around him? Is he to seek for 

 washes and dressings to cure such a disease as this? 

 Is he to expend butts of wine contending, as it were, 

 against the elements? No! Let him bear this al- 

 ways in mind, that no dressings have ever been 

 found to stop this ulcer, that no quantities of wine 

 or bark which a man can bear have ever retarded 

 this gangrene; let him bear in mind that this is a 

 hospital disease, that without the circle of the in- 

 fected walls the men are safe; let him, therefore, 

 hurry them out of this house of death ; let him change 

 the wards, let him take possession of some empty 

 house and so carry his patients into good air ; let him 

 lay them in a schoolroom, a church, on a dunghill, or 

 in a stable ; let him carry them anywhere but to their 

 graves. 12 



10 Wrench's Life of Lord Lister, p. 239. 



11 Cameron, British Medical //., Dec. 13, 1902, p. 1844. 



12 Bell, Principles of Surgery, 1826, I., p. 149. 



