CARL LUBWIG AND CARL THIERSCH. 349 



and his duties consisted merely in admitting students twice a week 

 to his visits among the sick, and in winter demonstrating the most 

 important operations on the cadaver. The faculty now in an en- 

 tirely professional manner desired the government to provide clinical 

 free beds, twenty medical and twenty surgical. To this request was 

 added a list of suggestions for the organization of a course of instruc- 

 tion in clinical surgery, for the furnishing of a collection of instru- 

 ments, and for a practical operative course. 



The adoption of these recommendations of the faculty was the 

 first decisive step toward a more perfect organization of surgical 

 instruction; a second step was taken in 1841 through the appoint- 

 ment of Professor Giinther, of Kiel, as professor of surgery and sur- 

 gical demonstrator. Thus the existence of a regular surgical clinic in 

 Leipsic dates back hardly fifty years. Even then the conditions of 

 its existence were unfavorable enough, and hospital gangrene, in 

 spite of the open-air barracks devised by Giinther in the surgical 

 department of the hospital, was a matter of inevitable recurrence. 

 The surgical clinic only attained its full development a generation 

 later, under Thiersch. It was also he who put an end to the un- 

 worthy subordination of the surgeons to the physicians. 



Giinther died in 1866, and after his death it is again a report 

 from the pen of E. H. Weber which sets forth the point of view of 

 the faculty. The first necessity seems to be now to provide a more 

 suitably arranged hospital; the faculty therefore insists on the im- 

 portance of appointing a man able to undertake the task of organiz- 

 ing its erection. This requirement was entirely fulfilled by the 

 appointment of Thiersch in the following year, 1867. 



At the time when the task of attending to the building of the 

 new Jacob's Hospital with Wunderlich fell to Thiersch, the allied 

 questions of surgical treatment and of hospital construction were 

 undergoing a thorough revolution. As early as between 1850 and 

 1860 French physicians had recognized the mortifying fact that in 

 English hospitals the number of successful operations was incal- 

 culably larger than in their own. The most careful examination of 

 the conditions of both resulted only in the discovery of the far greater 

 cleanliness and better ventilation of English institutions. Moreover, 

 an English physician, Spencer Wells, had applied the principle of 

 absolute cleanliness to operations in the abdominal cavity with start- 

 ling success, thus making these previously almost necessarily fatal 

 operations comparatively harmless. During the American civil war, 

 important knowledge as to the best conditions for the treatment of 

 wounds was gained. It was discovered that the wounded recovered 

 most safely and rapidly in the airiest apartments, in lightly built 

 barracks, or in open tents. Thiersch, with his keen insight, at once 



