NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



anthrax, that scepticism was at last quieted for all 

 time to come. 



Henceforth no one could doubt that the contagious 

 disease anthrax is due exclusively to the introduction 

 into an animal's system of a specific germ a micro- 

 scopic plant which develops there. And no logical 

 mind could have a reasonable doubt that what is proved 

 true of one infectious disease would some day be proved 

 true also of other, perhaps of all, forms of infectious 

 maladies. 



Hitherto the cause of contagion, by which certain 

 maladies spread from individual to individual, had been 

 a total mystery, quite unillumined by the vague terms 

 " miasm," " humor," " virus," and the like cloaks of ig- 

 norance. Here and there a prophet of science, as 

 Schwann and Henle, had guessed the secret ; but guess- 

 ing, in science, is far enough from knowing. Now, for 

 the first time, the world knew, and medicine had taken 

 another gigantic stride towards the heights of exact 

 science. 



LISTER AND ANTISEPTIC SURGERY 



Meantime, in a different though allied field of medi- 

 cine there had been a complementary growth that led 

 to immediate results of even more practical impor- 

 tance. I mean the theory and practice of antisepsis 

 in surgery. This advance, like the other, came as a 

 direct outgrowth of Pasteur's fermentation studies of 

 alcoholic beverages, though not at the hands of Pas- 

 teur himself. Struck by the boundless implications 

 of Pasteur's revelations regarding the bacteria, Dr. 

 Joseph Lister (the present Lord Lister), then of Glas- 

 gow, set about as early as 1860 to make a wonderful 



229 



