ANTHRAX, CHICKEN-CHOLERA, ROUGET 57 



The War had found France unfamiliar with 

 Listerism. Thousands and thousands of wounded 

 had died, whom Listerism would have saved. Out 

 of this evil, came the establishment of the anti- 

 septic and aseptic method in Hospital practice in 

 Paris. But those of us who remember the venture 

 of faith in Lister, forty years ago, in this country, 

 can well understand that the way was even harder 

 for Pasteur. The teaching of Lister was concen- 

 trated on surgery : kill the " germs of putrefac- 

 tion " in a wound, and prevent more germs from 

 getting into it, and you will save your patient from 

 wound-infection. The teaching of Pasteur went 

 far beyond the reform of surgery : he was set on 

 the wider doctrine, that specific germs are indeed 

 the causes of specific diseases : he was founding 

 the whole dominion of bacteriology. At once, he 

 came into conflict with the doctors of the old 

 school. In April, 1873, he took his seat as an 

 Associate of the Academic de Medecine : then 

 began the years of controversy over the New 

 Pathology. He had to reckon not with surgeons 

 alone. Some of his opponents had not yet officially 

 recognised the death of the old belief in spontane- 

 ous generation : others would not hear of bacteria 

 as the true and only begetters of the infective dis- 

 eases. He was up against a blank wall of age and 

 convention. Not that he had no following: he 



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