PART II. SPECIFIC DISEASES AND THEIR 

 BACTERIA. 



A. THE PHLOGISTIC DISEASES. 



I. THE ACUTE INFLAMMATORY DISEASES. 



CHAPTER I. 

 SUPPURATION. 



SUPPURATION was at one time supposed to be an 

 inevitable outcome of the majority of wounds, and, 

 although bacteria were observed in the discharges, the 

 old habit of thought and insufficiency of information 

 caused most surgeons to believe that they were sponta- 

 neously developed there. 



Sir Joseph Leister, whose name we cannot sufficiently 

 honor, conceived that Pasteur's observations upon the 

 germs of life floating in the atmosphere, if they explained 

 the contamination of his sterile infusions, might also 

 explain the changes in wounds, and upon this idea 

 based that most successful system of treatment known 

 as ''antiseptic surgery." 



The further development of antiseptic surgery, and the 

 extremes into which it was carried by alienists, almost 

 attain to the ridiculous, for not only were the hands of 

 the operator, his instruments, sponges, sutures, ligatures, 

 and dressings kept constantly saturated with irritating 

 germicidal solutions, but at one time the air over the 

 wound was carefully saturated with pulverized antiseptic 

 lotions during the whole operation by means of a steam 

 atomizer. This rather monstrous outcome of the appli- 

 cation of Lister's system to surgery was the very natural 

 result of the erroneous idea that the germs which cause 



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