CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE 



1860 to make a wonderful application of these ideas. If 

 putrefaction is always due to bacterial development, he 

 argued, this must apply as well to living as to dead tis- 

 sues ; hence the putrefactive changes which -occur in 

 wounds and after operations on the human subject, from 

 which blood-poisoning so often follows, might be abso- 

 lutely prevented if the injured surfaces could be kept 

 free from access of the germs of decay. 



In the hope of accomplishing this result, Lister began 

 experimenting with drugs that might kill the bacteria 

 without injury to the patient, and with means to pre- 

 vent further access of germs once a wound was freed 

 from them. How well he succeeded, all the world 

 knows ; how bitterly he was antagonized for about a 

 score of years, most of the world has already forgotten. 

 As early as 1867, Lister was able to publish results 

 pointing towards success in his great project ; yet so in- 

 credulous were surgeons in general that even some years 

 later the leading surgeons across the Channel had not 

 so much as heard of his efforts. In 1870 the soldiers of 

 Paris died, as of old, of hospital gangrene; and when in 

 1871 the French surgeon Alphonse Guerin, stimulated 

 by Pasteur's studies, conceived the idea of dressing 

 wounds with cotton in the hope of keeping germs from 

 entering them, he was quite unaware that a British con- 

 temporary had preceded him by a full decade in this ef- 

 fort at prevention, and had made long strides towards 

 complete success. Lister's priority, however, and the 

 superiority of his method, were freely admitted by the 

 French Academy of Science, which in 1881 officially 

 crowned his achievement, as the Eoyal Society of Lon- 

 don had done the year before. 



By this time, to be sure, as everybody knows, Lister's 

 SB 385 



