74 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



the germs. Virchow and other microscopists have proved that bacteria 

 occur quite generally in such wounds in spite of this treatment. The cause 

 of their more rapid recovery must be sought elsewhere according to 

 Magnin. 



In 1874 Dr. Lister had sent Pasteur his "celebrated letter 

 acknowledging the value of his work in relation to antiseptic 

 surgery." Pasteur was then being "virtually transformed," Garri- 

 son says/"^ " from a chemist to a medical man, particularly in his 

 mode of attacking the problem of infectious diseases." Even as 

 the science of physiological chemistry is written before and after 

 Pasteur, and medical bacteriology before Koch and after Koch, 

 so surgery is divided into two great periods: before and after 

 Lister. ^'^ In France, Germany, and England, world renowned 

 institutions for the study of infectious diseases and their preven- 

 tion have been established, each to honor the work of a 

 countryman. 



During the 1870's and 1880's Lister was reforming surgical 

 practice on the bases of antisepsis and chemotherapy. This was 

 the period when Pasteur was "writing and speaking on wound 

 infections and the cause of puerperal or childbed fever and on 

 the necessity of an entire change in surgical procedure in order 

 to avoid the frightfully prevalent hospital infections."^'® In the 

 matter of puerperal fever studies, Pasteur had predecessors, among 

 them, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes of Boston and Dr. Ignaz 

 Semmelweis of Vienna.^" Lister was influenced by this part of 

 Pasteur's work, and by the latter's studies of air-borne bacteria, 

 bacterial wound infections, fermentation and putrefaction includ- 

 ing the ferments of lactic and butyric acids and, in fact, the whole 

 range of his investigations. At the microscope he himself had 

 studied the life histories of fungi and bacteria and their parts in 

 fermentation and putrefaction. ^^^ 



In his first volume of Bacteria in relation to plant diseases "^ 

 Smith evaluated the early work of Pasteur and Koch: 



*''* Intro, to the hist, of rned., op. cit., 576-571. 



^''^ Harvey Graham, The story of surgery, with a foreword by Oliver St. John 

 Gogarty, 361, N. Y., Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1939. 



^■"' E. F. Smith, Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 17. 



^'''^ Idem, n. 2. See also, C. C. Mettler, History of medicine, op. cit., 975-977, 

 account of studies before and by Pasteur on puerperal fever; F. H. Garrison, Intro, 

 to the hist of med., op. cit., 576-577, 435. 



^'^ Harvey Graham, The story of surgery, op. cit., 342-360, at p. 351. 



"• Op. cit., 152. 



