X1V INTRODUCTION 
everyday practice simpler. The writings published during this period are, as 
will be seen by reference to the second volume, chiefly devoted to such matters. 
At the same time he carried out investigations and published papers on other 
allied subjects, as, for example, on the germ theory of putrefaction, and on 
lactic fermentation. 
The last period of Lister’s active life dated from 1877, when he went to 
London in response to an invitation from the authorities of King’s College, 
to fill the chair of Clinical Surgery in succession to Sir William Fergusson. 
This period, which extends until his retirement from active surgical work in 
1892, may be characterized as one in which the final details of antiseptic surgery 
were more or less perfected. Various fresh antiseptics were tested, especially with 
the view of obtaining some antiseptic dressing which, while as reliable as the 
carbolic gauze, might yet prove less directly irritating, and being non-volatile 
might be trusted for longer periods, thus avoiding the necessity for frequent 
change of dressings and disturbance of the wounds. During this period, his 
method of treatment approximated more and more to his ideal of converting 
open wounds, as regards their subsequent course, to the condition of sub- 
cutaneous injuries. 
These preliminary remarks cannot be more appropriately brought to a 
close than by a reference to the unwearied help that Lady Lister afforded to her 
husband in the pursuit of his investigations throughout her life. Those who 
were admitted to the inner circle can never forget the vivid interest which she 
took in the details of his work, and the many closely written volumes of dictated 
notes in her handwriting containing full records of the experiments on which 
the conclusions expressed in the essays reproduced in these volumes were 
largely founded. 
PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PATHOLOGICAL WORK 
In his Huxley lecture,’ delivered in 1900, Lord Lister has given an account 
of some of his early physiological researches. In it he dwelt particularly on 
those researches which were more intimately connected with the development 
of his ideas upon the nature and causation of inflammation and suppuration. 
From this account it can be seen how Lister’s ideas of these processes 
gradually matured. It wanted only the conception of infection to complete 
them, and this was supplied in Pasteur’s discovery of the causation of putre- 
faction, the full significance of which Lister was thus able at once to realize. 
This chapter of scientific discovery could hardly have been more pleasingly 
po eb et oat na 
