206 Transactions of the Societg. 



much it may appeal to them as loyal subjects of His Majesty and 

 well-wishers of the brave men who are offering their all for a just 

 cause and in defence of a great and delectable country. Whilst 

 saying this, may 1 also say that I hate war and all that comes in 

 its train, and I hate it the more because I feel, long as I tried to 

 avoid the conviction that we had no alternative, that we must 

 fight or be content to see the weak trampled on, the free fettered, 

 liberty restricted and brute force worshipped as a fetish by a 

 nation, hypnotized by the concentration of a self-conscious gaze 

 upon its own intellectual achievements and material prosperity, 

 and led or misled by a small but powerful, if not intellectual, 

 caste of self-seeking and overbearing Prussian militarists. We go 

 into this fight with a magnificent fighting force ; to be efficient 

 that force must be healthy. It must be well fed, it must be pro- 

 tected from disease, and its wounded must be well cared for. How 

 much of the knowledge, the application of which ensures all- this, 

 do we owe to the Microscope ? Preventive inoculation against 

 enteric fever we owe to our penultimate President, Sir Almroth 

 Wright, who, following in the footsteps of a great Russian, Dr. 

 W. M. Haffkine, has done great things for our army. Moreover, 

 he still continues his beneficent work at the front, studying the 

 bacteriology of surgical wounds, study that must have a profound 

 and far-reaching bearing upon the treatment of wounds, and must 

 result in much saving of life and limb to the brave and cheerful 

 men who take their place in the fighting line. 



As an early disciple of the late Lord Lister I am naturally 

 greatly interested in the controversy that is going on amongst 

 surgeons — antiseptic surgery as against aseptic surgery. I do not 

 intend to-night to deal fully with what is a very abstruse question, 

 one mainly for the consideration of professional surgeons, but I do 

 wish to draw attention to the arguments of those surgeons at the 

 front who are now reverting, and I believe with good reason, to 

 Lister's antiseptic surgery. Working as I did with Lister in the old 

 Edinburgh Pioyal Infirmary many years ago, and comparing the 

 results he obtained with those obtained, then and siuce, by other 

 surgeons, I always call to mind two cases on which I followed 

 his demonstrations with the keenest interest — two cases which 

 illustrate very precisely the contentions of the two sets of surgeons. 

 One was a compound fracture of the leg — the result of a railway 

 accident — in which there had been considerable crushing of the 

 bones and tissues. When the patient came into hospital the 

 wound was soiled with earth and ashes, and there was evidently 

 considerable devitalization of much of the crushed tissue. Lister 

 went to work at once with great vigour and injected a strong solu- 

 tion of carbolic acid into the wound in order to wash out all foreign 

 matter ; he also removed crushed fragments of tissue and loose 

 particles of bone. I enter into these details, gentlemen, because 



