BEFORE AND AFTER LISTER 181 



tation, nor was there a single death from secondary hem- 

 orrhage or gangrene. No case of blood poisoning had 

 occurred for a year and a half, though sixty amputations 

 had been done. Just before Lister's method had been 

 introduced, of 17 amputations n had died from pyemia 

 alone, a mortality of 65 per cent. Just after adopting 

 Listerism the death rate of his amputations fell to 4 or 

 5 per cent. 18 



Hospital gangrene had been as it were "blown away" 

 by a puff ("weggeblasen") ; not a single case occurred. 

 In Lindpainter's extensive tables of Nussbaum's cases one 

 is struck, on glancing over them, to see how before the 

 antiseptic method was adopted case after case is marked 

 "died," "died," "died," and in the later tables, after its 

 adoption, almost a uniform "recovered," "recovered," "re- 

 covered." 



But the most striking testimony to the value of Lister's 

 services to suffering humanity is not the statistics of the 

 mortality in amputations, compound fractures, puerperal 

 fever 19 or in any single disease or operation, but in the 

 enormous and successful enlargement of the beneficent 

 field of surgery. In my own early days "before Lister" 

 the common operations were 



1. Amputations. 



2. Ligation of arteries. 



3. Removal of external tumors. 



4. Lithotomy. 



5. Tracheotomy, chiefly for croup and foreign bodies. 

 A few resections, colostomies, trephining (when unavoid- 

 able) and herniotomies (for strangulation) were done. 

 Ovariotomy was never done until the tumor bad become 

 so large as to threaten life, and even then operation was 

 denounced by many as wholly unjustifiable, for it had a 

 mortality as high as two out of every three cases. The 



Lancet, 1881, II., p. 281. 



19 See the extraordinarily interesting paper by J. Whitridgc 

 Williams, Jour. Am. Med. Ass., April 22, 1911. 



