THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



one would for a moment think of questioning going to 

 prove the bacterial origin of 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 Sch wann 

 and Henle, had guessed the secret; but guessing, in sci- 

 ence, 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. 



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 importance. 

 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 Pasteur himself. Struck by 

 the boundless implications of Pasteur's revelations re- 

 garding the bacteria, Dr. Joseph Lister (the present 

 Lord Lister), then of Glasgow, set about as early as 



382 



