18731877 235 



Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, surgery had 

 positively retrograded ; the mortality after operations was in- 

 finitely less in the preceding centuries, because antisepsis was 

 practised unknowingly, though cauterizations by fire, boiling 

 liquids and disinfecting substances. In a popular handbook 

 published in 1749, and entitled Medicine and Surgery for the 

 Poor, we read that wounds should be kept from the contact 

 of air ; it was also recommended not to touch the wound with 

 fingers or instruments. " It is very salutary, when uncover- 

 ing the wound in order to dress it, to begin by applying over 

 its whole surface a piece of cloth dipped into hot wine or 

 brandy." Good results had been obtained by the great sur- 

 geon Larrey, under the first Empire, by hot oil, hot brandy, 

 and unfrequent dressings. But, under the influence of 

 Broussais, the theory of inflammation caused a retrogression 

 in surgery. Then came forth basins for making poultices, 

 packets of charpie (usually made of old hospital sheets merely 

 washed), and rows of pots of ointment. It is true that, during 

 the second half of the last century, a few attempts were made 

 to renew the use of alcoholized water for dressings. In 1868, 

 at the time when the mortality after amputation in hospitals 

 was over sixty per cent., Surgeon L6on Le Fort banished 

 sponges, exacted from his students scrupulous cleanliness and 

 constant washing of hands and instruments before every 

 operation, and employed alcoholized water for dressings. But 

 though he obtained such satisfactory results as to lower, in 

 his wards at the Hopital Cochin, the average of mortality 

 after amputations to twenty-four per cent., his colleagues 

 were very far from suspecting that the first secret for prevent- 

 ing fatal results after -operations consisted in a reform of 

 the dressings. 



Those who visited an ambulance ward during the war of 

 1870, especially those who were medical students, have pre- 

 served such a recollection of the sight that they do not, even 

 now, care to speak about it. It was perpetual agony, the 

 wounds of all the patients were suppurating, a horrible fetor 

 pervaded the place, and infectious septicaemia was everywhere. 

 " Pus seemed to germinate everywhere," said a student of that 

 time (M. Landouzy, who became a professor at the Faculty 

 of Medicine), "as if it had been sown by the surgeon." M. 

 Landouzy also recalled the words of M. Denonvilliers , a sur- 

 geon of the Charit^ Hospital, whom he calls "a splendid 



