NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



By this time, to be sure, as everybody knows, Lis- 

 ter's new methods had made their way everywhere, 

 revolutionizing the practice of surgery and practically 

 banishing from the earth maladies that hitherto had 

 been the terror of the surgeon and the opprobrium of 

 his art. And these bedside studies, conducted in the 

 end by thousands of men who had no knowledge of 

 microscopy, had a large share in establishing the gen- 

 eral belief in the causal relation that micro-organisms 

 bear to disease, which by about the year 1880 had taken 

 possession of the medical world. But they did more; 

 they brought into equal prominence the idea that, the 

 cause of a diseased condition being known, it may be pos- 

 sible as never before to grapple with and eradicate that 

 condition. 



PREVENTIVE INOCULATION 



The controversy over spontaneous generation, which, 

 thanks to Pasteur and Tyndall, had just been brought 

 to a termination, made it clear that no bacterium need 

 be feared where an antecedent bacterium had not found 

 lodgment; Listerism in surgery had now shown how 

 much might be accomplished towards preventing the 

 access of germs to abraded surfaces of the body and 

 destroying those that already had found lodgment 

 there. As yet, however, there was no inkling of a way 

 in which a corresponding onslaught might be made 

 upon those other germs which find their way into the 

 animal organism by way of the mouth and the nostrils, 

 and which, as was now clear, are the cause of those con- 

 tagious diseases which, first and last, claim so large a 

 proportion of mankind for their victims. How such 

 means might be found now became the anxious thought 



VOL. nr. 16 231 



