442 Biochemical News, Notes and Comment [June-September 



The wonderful strides which surgery has made during these years 

 are fresh in our minds. The work of the surgeon is not confined to 

 the repair of wounds, the correction of deformities, or the removal 

 of tissues. Deficiencies may be supplied by transplantation ; trans- 

 f usion is readily carried out ; a new era in reconstructive surgery has 

 been inaugurated. There is no reason to believe that the end of these 

 progressive advances in surgery in recent years is in sight As a 

 recent writer has remarked, surgery is no longer merely an art of 

 skilful cutting and sewing; it has risen to the higher level of a 

 science. 



"The incalculable benefit of Lister's studies, and of that which 

 has grown out of them, can best be appreciated in the contempla- 

 tion of the surgical infections which, in the memory of physicians 

 now hving, were once the dread of all operating surgeons. Park^ 

 has thus recorded his impressions of the earlier days : ' I deem myself 

 fortunate in this — that I have been a living witness of the benefit of 

 the change f rom the old to the new, since when I began my work, in 

 1876 (over twenty years ago), as a hosp. intern, in one of the largest 

 hosp. in this country, it happened that during my first winter's expe- 

 rience — with but one or two exceptions — every patient operated upon 

 in that hosp., and that by men who were esteemed the peers of any 

 one in their day, died of blood poisoning, while I myself nearly per- 

 ished from the same disease. This was in an absolutely new build- 

 ing, where expenditure had been lavish; one whose walls were not 

 reeking with germs, as is the case yet in many of the old and well- 

 established institutions. With the introduction of the antiseptic 

 method, during the two years following, this frightful mortality was 

 reduced to the average of the day, and in the same Institution today 

 is done as good work as that seen anywhere. The same was true 

 without exception in the great hospitals of the Old World; and in 

 Paris, where, 30 years ago, famous surgeons would go from one end 

 of the building to the other, handling one patient after another with- 

 out ever washing their hands, and where erysipelas and contagion of 

 various kinds were thoroughly distributed, as it were, impartially, 

 now the successors of these very same men, employing modern 

 methods, get results which challenge comparison.' 



6 Park: An epitome of the history of medicine, 1898, p. 326. 



