178 CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE 



eminent by a most happy sentiment by Mr. Bayard the 

 American Ambassador. Said he, addressing Lister: 



My Lord, it is not a Profession, it is not a Nation, 

 it is Humanity itself which, with uncovered head, sa- 

 lutes you. 



Better, far better, such a eulogium than the peerage 

 which had been already bestowed upon him. 



Having now traced so imperfectly the fortunes of the 

 germ theory, let us see the results of Lister's labors. The 

 first results are his own, especially in Glasgow. There 

 the horrible conditions he has so startlingly portrayed 12 

 should have made his wards a charnel house. 



The mortality in the other accident ward was so ex- 

 cessive that it had to be closed. But in Lister's ward, 

 separated from the other only by a corridor twelve feet 

 wide, for the nine months "in which his antiseptic system 

 had been fairly in operation . . . not a single case of 

 pyemia, erysipelas or hospital gangrene had occurred." 



The reason for his first attempt to apply the antiseptic 

 system to man is well stated in his very first paper on the 

 antiseptic method in i867. 13 He wrote: 



The frequency of disastrous consequences in com- 

 pound fracture, contrasted with the complete im- 

 munity from danger to life or limb in simple fracture, 

 is one of the most striking as well as melancholy 

 facts in surgical practice. 



Well might he say this, for while simple fractures had 

 practically no mortality, the mortality of compound frac- 

 tures was all the way from 28 to 68 per cent. ! In this, 



12 Lancet, 1870, I, pp. 4, 40, and quoted in my Animal Experi- 

 mentation and Medical Progress, pp. 216-218. 



13 Lancet, 1867, I., p. 326 et seq. and II., p. 95, and Lister's 

 Collected Papers, II., p. 1. 



