A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



application of these ideas. If putrefaction is always 

 due to bacterial development, he argued, this must 

 apply as well to living as to dead tissues; hence the 

 putrefactive changes which occur in wounds and after 

 operations on the human subject, from which blood- 

 poisoning so often follows, might be absolutely prevent- 

 ed 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 on the Continent 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 Gu6rin, stimu- 

 lated by Pasteur's studies, conceived the idea of dress- 

 ing wounds with cotton in the hope of keeping germs 

 from entering them, he was quite unaware that a Brit- 

 ish contemporary had preceded him by a full decade in 

 this effort 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 Sciences, which in 1881 

 officially crowned his achievement, as the Royal So- 

 ciety of London had done the year before. 



230 



