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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1918. 



TUE NEW ERA IN MEDICINE. 

 Lord Lister. By Sir Rickman J. Godlee, Bart. 



Pp. xix + 676. (London: Macmillan and Co., 



Ltd., 1917.) Price i8s. net. 

 '^"HIS is a worthy biography of a very great 

 J- man. Sir Rickman Godlee had to decide 

 whether to write a Hterary biography in which 

 the personaUty of Lister should be the central 

 motive— a biography for the general reader— or, 

 without neglecting this portrait, to build it, as 

 wisely he has done, around his surgical and 

 scientific occupations. The volume is, neverthe- 

 less, one to appeal not to medical readers only, but 

 also to all men of science ; and indeed to all those 

 Ixyond who find an interest in the methods of 

 discovery. The work is bulky, and some parts of 

 it — for example the period of the failing light — 

 might have been abridged; still on the whole 

 this comprehensive book well reflects the life of 

 toil and devotion which ransomed mankind from 

 some of the most frequent and terrible of its pains 

 and sorrows. Could the irony of things cut deeper 

 than in that meeting of Lister in Pisa with a pro- 

 cession of the Archbishop in fyjl dress, attended 

 by ecclesiastics of various grades, chanting a 

 prayer to Ranieri, the patron saint of the city, for 

 his intercession against the cholera and the disease 

 of the vines (p. 54). Now, as in all critical periods 

 of medicine, surgery has led the way. 



In the old maxim, to choose your parents wisely. 

 Lister was not wanting. His father was a. man of 

 science of considerable and abiding distinction; 

 and whs moreover no inconsiderable scholar. The 

 ix:)rtrait of his mother speaks of a woman likewise 

 of rare intelligence and refinement. And over the 

 home rested the pure and gentle spirit of the 

 Society of Friends. 



Early in his life Lister was impelled to biological 

 studies, and soon made his choice of the profession 

 of medicine ; but father and son were of one mind 

 that, although scientific pursuits were by no means 

 to be laid aside, yet a good literary and mathe- 

 matical education should be pursued also, to the 

 end of school life. Thus it was that Lister was 

 well equipped as a scholar, and all through life 

 lie cherished not only that admiration which we 

 all assume as we glance at our masterpieces sleep- 

 ing in their presses, but also made them — Horac'e, 

 Virgil, and Dante especially — the companions of 

 his scanty leisure and holidays. 



It has been said that Lister was but a plodder, 

 a man rather of indefatigable industry than of 

 imaginative genius. The truth is, imagination is 

 of two chief kinds : the concrete, as in Reynolds, 

 Turner, Keats, Rodin ; the abstract, as in Newton, 

 Maxwell, Pasteur, Darwin. In discoverers of this 

 company, of which was Lister, the act of imagina- 

 tion consists, not in the building of aesthetic 

 memories into an image, but in the conception 

 and synthesis of principles, principles akin, but 

 which, to ordinary vision, had been unseen 

 XO. 2522, VOL. 100] 



or their kinship unrecognised. When on this per- 

 ception of underlying affinity a new synthesis is 

 revealed, it often comes in a flash, because the com- 

 bining principles meet in the mind of a genius 

 already vigilant and charged with prepared 

 materiids. Thus Pasteur's spark fell into a pro- 

 phetic and impassioned mind already charged by 

 vast and fertile labours, and by thought, experi- 

 ence, and foresight. The powder was ready and 

 dry. The same essay by Pasteur that was shown 

 to Lister by Prof. Thomas Anderson in 1865 had 

 in the year before been shown to Spencer Wells, 

 but the flash did not happen. 



The "taking pains" part of genius, cherished, 

 let us not forget, by his devoted wife, was in 

 Lister almost stupendous. The present writer, 

 who had the privilege of Lister's friendship, until 

 he read this book had but an imperfect notion of 

 its magnitude and variety; and behind it burned 

 the sleepless passion of human love. He recalls 

 one vivid conversation in which Lister described 

 his restlessness, while house-surgeon to Syme, 

 under this consuming passion. Driven by it, he 

 would repair of an evening to the wards to rein- 

 vestigate the wounds, and again and again to 

 scrape away fragments of tissues and discharges 

 for examination by chemical and histological 

 methods. Without this profound knowledge and 

 experience of tissue perversions, controlled also by 

 innumerable experiments, as upon the frog's web 

 and bat's wing — methods devised by himself — he 

 would have been as unprepared as were his 

 surgical contemporaries to descry the power and 

 the compass of Pasteur's discovery. We should 

 add that in these preliminary researches he never 

 ceased to proclaim his debt to W^harton Jones, 

 and especially to Sharpey.. And not only was 

 Lister thus prepared beforehand, but his later 

 bacteriological work also was far greater and richer 

 than is generally appreciated. He invented the 

 "hot box," and his were the methods of culture 

 which held the field until they were superseded by 

 Koch's solid media. 



W^hen the writer joined the honorary staff of 

 the old Leeds Infirmary at least one-third of the 

 amputations of the thigh were mortal. In the 

 magnificent new building things were at first but 

 little better ; the ovariotomies — then a new and 

 tentative operation, it is true — were so mortal that 

 murmurs arose not only outside the hospital, but 

 also within it. Yet in most instances these and such 

 patients had. been placed in single rooms apart, 

 rooms as clean as housemaids could make them. 

 What nevertheless that death-rate was I dare 

 not try to remember. SuflSce it to say that Erich- 

 sen was proud of results in which 25 per cent. 

 of his major operations were mortal ; of a certain 

 163 amputations Billroth lost nearly one-half — 

 viz. seventy-five cases. In the hospitals of Paris 

 generally the death-rate of major operations 

 amounted to more than 50 per cent. In the 

 London hospitals (1800 beds) the death-roll of all 

 operations was no less than 38 per cent. ! 



We were all so proud of our housemaiding that 

 when Rolleston, in his address on physiology at 



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