ANTISEPTIC SURGERY 157 



tions was appalling. It was the rule that wounds 

 became charged with pus, and it was fortunate if 

 they were not followed by gangrene and general 

 blood poisoning. Hospitals as places for operating 

 were simply hotbeds of infection, and many hospi- 

 tals had reputations that led them to be regarded as 

 mere portals to death. The leader in the effort to 

 eliminate infections from surgical operations was 

 Joseph Lister, Professor of Surgery in the Univer- 

 sity of Edinburgh. Lister, whose name is now so 

 frequently coupled with that of Pasteur, was a 

 medical man of unusually broad training and an 

 investigator of note in the science of physiology. 

 Primarily he was a man of science. He had fol- 

 lowed with great interest Pasteur's work on fer- 

 mentation, putrefaction and the problem of spon- 

 taneous generation, and he became convinced that 

 the mischievous agents of infection which give the 

 surgeon so much trouble are bacteria, which gain 

 access to wounds from the outside. If this were 

 true it should be a part of surgical technic to get 

 rid of these offending organisms. Accordingly 

 Lister thoroughly disinfected everything used in an 

 operation; the hands of the surgeon, instruments, 

 bandages and other apparatus were washed in a 

 solution of carbolic acid, and at first, a fine spray 



