1870—1872 187 



one day, addressed two noteworthy letters to the President of 

 the Academy. Those letters mark a date in the history of 

 surgery, and show how restricted was then in France the 

 share of some of Pasteur's ideas at the very time when in 

 other countries they were adopted and followed. Lister, the 

 celebrated English surgeon, having, he said, meditated on 

 Pasteur's theory of germs, and proclaimed himself his fol- 

 lower, convinced that complications and infection of wounds 

 were caused by their giving access to living organisms and in- 

 fectious germs, elements of trouble, often of death, had already 

 in 1867 inaugurated a method of treatment. He attempted the 

 destruction of germs floating in air by means of a vaporizer 

 filled with a carbolic solution, then isolated and preserved the 

 wound from the contact of the air. Sponges, drainage tubes, 

 etc., were subjected to minute precautions; in one word, he 

 created antisepsis. Four months before the war he had pro- 

 pounded the principles which should guide surgeons, but it 

 occurred to no one in France, in the first battles, to apply the 

 new method. *'The horrible mortality amongst the wounded 

 in battle," writes Sedillot, ''calls for the attention of all the 

 friends of science and humanity. The surgeon's art, hesitat- 

 ing and disconcerted, pursues a doctrine whose rules seem to 

 flee before research. . . . Places where there are wounded are 

 recognizable by the fetor of suppuration and gangrene.^* 



Hundreds and thousands of wounded, their faces pale, but 

 full of hope and desire to live, succumbed between the eighth 

 and tenth day to gangrene and erysipelas. Those failures 

 of the surgery of the past are plain to us now that the doctrine 

 of germs has explained everything; but, at that time, such an 

 avowal of impotence before the mysterious contagium sui 

 generis, which, the doctors averred, eluded all research, and 

 such awful statistics of mortality embittered the anguish of 

 defeat. 



The Academy then attempted to take a share in the national 

 co-operation by making a special study of any subject which 

 interested the public health and defence. A sitting on methods 

 of steering balloons was succeeded by another on various means 

 of preserving meat during the siege. Then came an anxious 

 inquiry into modes of alimentation of infants. At the end of 

 October there were but 20,000 litres of milk per day to be pro- 

 cured in the whole of Paris, and the healthy were implored to 

 abst-ain from it. It was a question of life and death for young 



