FURTHER EVIDENCE ON ANTISEPTIC SYSTEM OF TREATMENT 157 



it must be clear to any surgeon who has adopted your method that unless \'ou 

 take the greatest precautions in every dressing till the wound is either healed 

 or filled up with granulations, you will never see the excellent effects of this 

 treatment. It certainly takes much longer time, and demands much greater 

 precautions, than any other dressing ; but the reward is certain, and it is a great 

 satisfaction to know that the good result of many operations almost entirely 

 depends upon your dressing of the wound. As an instance of this I may men- 

 tion the following case : A man came to me with a foreign body in the left 

 knee. I thought it to be, not a loose cartilage, but a fragment of the tibia, 

 loosened by the kick of a horse eight years ago. It was situated behind the 

 Hgamentum patellae, was a httle movable, and grated very distinctly as two 

 osseous surfaces would do. I made a large incision on the outer side of the 

 capsule and tried to extract it, but the surfaces were so much entangled in each 

 other that I was obliged to use my finger and different hooks and forceps before 

 I got it out. The operation lasted certainly a quarter of an hour, and during 

 the whole time I poured a stream of carbolic solution over the wound. Having 

 extracted it at last, it proved to be really a part of the head of the tibia with 

 its cartilaginous surface on it, and of the size of a small walnut. I treated anti- 

 septically, and the wound closed without any suppuration in the joint. All the 

 compound fractures which I had to deal with last year, some of them very 

 severe ones, have healed without the least suppuration in the fracture itself, 

 and the consolidation did not take much longer time than in a simple fracture. 

 All the amputations of this year have recovered. There has certainh- been some 

 suppuration, but it never became profuse, and I never observed any putrefaction. 

 I feel so much indebted to you for what I have learnt in seeing you employing the 

 antiseptic dressing, that I thought it my duty to let you know how things went 

 on in my hospital practice ; and I am happy to say that I never tried any inno- 

 vation which answered so admirably as this treatment of wounds. — Believe me, 

 my dear Sir, ever yours, 



' Saxtorph. 



'July 18, 1870.' 



It may seem strange that results like these should have been obtained in 

 Copenhagen, when so little approach to them has yet been made in the capital 

 of England. The fact, however, is not difficult to explain. Want of success 

 in many quarters has not arisen from any unwillingness to try a new mode of 

 practice. On the contrary, the publication of my first papers was followed 

 by a very general employment of the material which I happened to select for 

 carrying out the treatment, and which, unfortunately for the principle involved, 

 was then little known in British surgery, so that the striking results which were 

 recorded were too often attributed to some specific virtue in the agent. The 

 antiseptic system does not owe its efficacy to any such cause, nor can it be 

 taught by any rule of thumb. One rule, indeed, there is of universal ajiplica- 

 tion — namely this : whatever be the antiseptic means cniployed (and they may 

 be very various), use them so as to render impossible the existence of a living septic 

 organism in the part concerned. But the carrying out of this rule iin])lies a con- 



