694 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



notions, and forming the groundwork of much of our modern teach- 

 ing on the subject." 



Lister's work in connection with antiseptic surgery began while 

 he was at Glasgow. Some of the surgical wards of the Royal 

 Infirmary there were distinguished for their unhealthiness, in which 

 they were hardly surpassed in the kingdom. The method he em- 

 ployed then was very crude and rudimentary, but he applied it with 

 the result, as he was able to believe he could say without exaggera- 

 tion, that those particular wards became " the healthiest in the 

 world; while other wards, separated from mine only by a passage 

 a few feet broad, where former modes of treatment were for a 

 while continued, retained their former insalubrity." Equally strik- 

 ing changes were afterward witnessed in other institutions, as in the 

 Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Munich, the director of which, Pro- 

 fessor von Nussbaum, sent his assistant to Edinburgh, whither Lister 

 had removed, to learn the details of the antiseptic system as it was 

 then practiced. From the day the system was introduced into the 

 Krankenhaus, hospital gangrene, which had infected eighty per cent 

 of the wounds treated, disappeared entirely, and pyaemia and ery- 

 sipelas soon followed it. " But it was by no means only in removing 

 the unhealthiness of hospitals that the antiseptic system showed 

 its benefits. Inflammation being suppressed, with attendant pain, 

 fever, and wasting discharge, the sufferings of the patient were, of 

 course, immensely lessened; rapid primary union being now the 

 rule, convalescence was correspondingly curtailed; while as regards 

 safety and the essential nature, it became a matter of indifference 

 whether the wound had clean-cut surfaces which could be closely 

 approximated, or whether the injury inflicted had been such as to 

 cause destruction of tissue. And operations which had been re- 

 garded from time immemorial as unjustifiable were adopted with 

 complete safety." 



Lister relates in his British Association address that he had been 

 long impressed with the greatness of the evil of putrefaction in 

 surgery, and had done his best to mitigate it by the use of various 

 deodorant lotions. It does not appear to have been quite clear as 

 yet what the cause of it was. Liebig's theory that it was an effect 

 of oxygen was still current; and if this were the fact, the pre- 

 vention altogether seemed to be hopeless. " But when Pasteur had 

 shown that putrefaction was a fermentation caused by the growth 

 of microbes, and that these could not arise de novo in the decom- 

 posable substance, the problem assumed a more hopeful aspect. If 

 the wound could be treated with some substance which, without 

 doing too serious mischief to the human tissues, would kill the 

 microbes already contained in it and prevent the future access of 



