18731877 239 



A medical student, M. Just Lucas-Championniere who 

 later on became an exponent in France of this method, and 

 who described it in a valuable treatise published in 1876 had 

 already in 1869, after a journey to Glasgow, stated in the 

 Journal de medecine et de chirurgie pratique what were those 

 first principles of defence against gangrene " extreme and 

 minute care in the dressing of wounds." But his isolated voice 

 was not heard ; neither was any notice taken of a celebrated lec- 

 ture given by Lister at the beginning of 1870 on the penetrating 

 of germs into a purulent centre and on the utility of antisepsis 

 applied to clinical practice. A few months before the war, 

 Tyndall, the great English physicist, alluded to this lecture in 

 an article entitled " Dusts and Diseases," which was published 

 by the Revue des cours scientifiques. But the heads of the pro- 

 fession in France had at that time absolute confidence in them- 

 selves, and nobody took any interest in the rumour of success 

 attained by the antiseptic method. Yet, between 1867 and 

 1869, thirty-four of Lister's patients out of forty had survived 

 after amputation. It is impossible on reading of this not to feel 

 an immense sadness at the thought of the hundreds and 

 thousands of young men who perished in ambulances and hospi- 

 tals during the fatal year, and who might have been saved by 

 Lister's method. In his own country, Lister had also been 

 violently criticized. " People turned into ridicule Lister's 

 minute precautions in the dressing of wounds," writes a com- 

 petent judge, Dr. Auguste Eeaudin, a professor at the Geneva 

 Faculty of Medicine, " and those who lost nearly all their 

 patients by poulticing them had nothing but sarcasms for the 

 man who was so infinitely superior to them." Lister, with 

 his calm courage and smiling kindliness, let people talk, and 

 endeavoured year by year to perfect his method, testing it 

 constantly and improving it in detail. No one, however 

 sceptical , whom he invited to look at his results , could preserve 

 his scepticism in the face of such marked success. 



Some of his opponents thought to attack him on another 

 point by denying him the priority of the use of carbolic acid. 

 Lister never claimed that priority, but his enemies took 

 pleasure in recalling that Jules Lemaire, in 1860, had proposed 

 the use of weak carbolic solution for the treatment of open 

 wounds, and that the same had been prescribed by Dr. Dclat 

 in 1861, and also by Maisonneuve, Demarquay and others. 

 The fact that should have been proclaimed was that Lister 



