INTRODUCTION Xlil 
republished,’ septic diseases were seldom absent, and the mortality from 
wounds and after all surgical operations was enormous. At the beginning 
of his career in Glasgow we find him continuing his work on the coagulation of 
the blood, the subject to which he devoted the Croonian Lecture delivered before 
the Royal Society in 1863 ; but he published also several important contribu 
tions to practical surgery, including the introduction of a new method of 
excising the wrist-joint, and the preparation of articles on anaesthetics and on 
amputation for Holmes’s System of Surgery 
But the gravity and constant prevalence of septic diseases in his wards, and 
the distressing mortality which occurred in consequence thereof, often in the most 
promising cases, so disappointed, pained, and distressed him, that his thoughts 
became more and more turned to the question of the cause and prevention of 
these disasters. Very many methods were tried in the hope of improving the 
treatment of wounds and the salubrity of his wards, for he was not satisfied 
to accept the fatalistic view then prevalent that septic diseases of wounds were 
unavoidable incidents, as much acts of God as a hail in harvest, and matters, 
therefore, in regard to which the surgeon had no personal responsibility. It 
was out of this divine discontent with things as they then were that there grew 
up the great work of his life, the introduction of the antiseptic method of wound 
treatment. During the remainder of this period of his life the majority of the 
papers he published were concerned with this subject, and others, such as those 
on the methods of ligaturing blood-vessels and stitching wounds, hada direct and 
essential bearing upon it. While his main aim was from the first and always the 
prevention of sepsis in wounds, he at the same time recognised, equally from the 
beginning, the importance of diminishing and as far as possible neutralizing the 
irritation of the wound and the general toxic effects which might be produced 
by the chemical substances employed as antiseptics. 
The fourth period in his life was that during which he occupied the chair 
of Clinical Surgery in the University of Edinburgh. To this he was appointed 
by the Crown on the resignation of Mr. Syme. He assumed its duties at the 
beginning of the winter session of 1869. Already in Glasgow the soundness 
of the principles on which he was proceeding had been thoroughly established, 
but the methods by which those principles were carried into practice were still 
cumbrous and far from perfect ; during his incumbency of the Edinburgh Chair 
he was largely occupied in devising and testing improvements in the methods of 
carrying out the antiseptic principle, with the object of rendering its use in 
* Vol. li, pp. 123 and 156. 
2 These articles, revised at a later date, are reprinted by permission of Messrs, Longmans at p. 135 
of this volume, and p. 378 of volume ii. 
