41 



ligatures, nor the surgeon's hands, nor the patient's 

 skin, lend themselves to be sterilised by heat. It 

 is true, that Lister was more afraid of the powers 

 of the air, half a century ago, than surgeons are 

 now : it is true that his use of a carbolic spray, to 

 sterilise the air round the wound, has been given 

 up * : but the law of all operations remains to-day 



* Sir Hector Cameron, his house-surgeon at the Glasgow 

 Infirmary, and his life-long friend, writes of him : " After he 

 had gone to Edinburgh (1870) he began the use of a carbolic 

 acid spray, during operation and the subsequent dressings of 

 the wound, with the object of displacing the surrounding 

 atmosphere and substituting for it one charged with a finely- 

 divided germicidal solution. Later experience, and the 

 growth of bacteriological knowledge, convinced him, in after 

 years, that such precautions were not really necessary : and 

 he * was led to conclude that it was the grosser forms of septic 

 mischief, rather than microbes in the attenuated form in which 

 they existed in the atmosphere, that we had to dread in 

 surgical practice/ He had hinted, at the London Medical 

 Congress in 1881, when describing some bacteriological ex- 

 periments which he had carried out, that it might yet be 

 possible to disregard the atmosphere. It was not, however, 

 until the Berlin Congress in 1890 that he was able to bring 

 forward what he considered absolute demonstration of the 

 harmlessness of this supposed source of infection, and to 

 announce that he felt himself justified in abandoning the use 

 of the spray ... I refer to this matter in some detail 

 because I often hear people speak as if, at this early period 

 of his work, infection of the wound by the atmosphere was 

 the only source of defilement against which he took pre- 

 cautions. Nothing could be further from the truth. If he 

 did guard against that supposed source of danger with an 

 unnecessarily constant and watchful rigour, he was equally 

 insistent, from the first, upon the careful sterilising, by means 

 of carbolic acid solution, of all hands coming directly or 

 indirectly into contact with the wound ; as well as the skin 



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