Mail and Microbes. 91 



XL LISTER AND ANTISEPSIS. 

 Until this time no attempts were made to clean and sterilize 

 wounds. If the foul, deadly suppuration was due to some 

 reaction between exposed flesh and air, why should concern be 

 manifested towards maintaining a clean wound? A scratch in 

 that day was as fatal as a bullet wound of to-day. One needs 

 but to familiarize himself with surgical history of former 

 European wars to realize the enormity of infection. It is said 

 that during Napoleon's campaigns it was found to be far more 

 expedient to place slightly wounded soldiers — soldiers with 

 wounds which in this day would be regarded as trivial, and 

 would not greatly incapacitate them — before the firing squad. 

 Dead soldiers were far more valuable than infected soldiers. 

 Our greatest human catastrophies of the Civil War were ones 

 of infection. Practically every head and abdominal wound 

 proved fatal. A driver of one of the ambulances in that war 

 was asked if he knew how to treat wounded men. "Oh, yes," 

 he replied, "if they are hit here (pointing to the abdomen), 

 knock 'em on the head." 



Then for years there was the great waste of life in both 

 private and hospital practice. Hospitals were known as veri- 

 table houses of death, and, like Dante's Inferno, the gates 

 might well have borne these words in somber color : "All hope 

 abandon, ye who enter in." Great loss of life was especially 

 experienced in the lying-in hospitals, where practically every 

 mother, after giving birth to her offspring, left the wards in 

 coffins. In the Munich krankenhaus 80 percent of all wounded 

 became gangrenous. In 1868 the death rate alone for ampu- 

 tations was 60 percent. Lingo Porto, a famous Italian sur- 

 geon, regarded the patients in his hospital chiefly as material 

 for his museum. 



Such was the indescribable horror of the day when microbes 

 were considered the direct products of reaction between air 

 and flesh. 



Following up Pasteur's incontrovertible demonstration. 

 Lord Lister began his famous studies of asepsis and antisepsis. 

 Carbolic acid was found to be a splendid antiseptic, and as a 

 result of the untiring efforts of this man, who had obtained 

 the master idea from Pasteur, humanity to-day sits firmly 

 ensconced with wounds which formerly would have been fatal, 

 but now are regarded as nothing more than temporarily in- 

 convenient. 



