160 
NATURE 
[APRIL 8, 1915 

desiccated fat-free substances of a cow’s corpus luteum 
into a laying fowl at once inhibits ovulation. The 
possible practical importance of studies in heredity is 
shown by a short pamphlet from the annual report 
of the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station for 
1914 On improving egg-production by breeding, and by 
a Bulletin (No. rro) of the U.S. Department of Agri- 
culture (Bureau of Animal Industry), in which Dr. 
Pearl, with Dr. F. M. Surface, gives ‘‘A Biometrical 
Study of Egg-Production in the Domestic Fowl.”’ 

BANG KE OAL SEA 
HEN Sir James Crichton-Browne, amongst 
whose many charms is a singular felicity of 
phraseology, invited me to undertake this task, he 
kindly supplied the title. It sounded rather startling, 
but as I could not think of a better, I humbly accepted 
it. It shows that I have no great discovery to 
announce, no new theory to propound, but only to 
take you back over old, well-trodden ground, to try 
to interest you in very technical matters, and to sug- 
gest that, in this particular case, reaction has over- 
stepped the bounds of moderation, and that, as in 
many other fields, the most modern ideas are not | 
always the best. 
I will not trace the various steps by which Lister 
was led to his conclusions about the causes of suppura- 
tion and hospital diseases, nor draw a lurid picture 
of the deplorable mortality from these diseases before 
the introduction of the antiseptic system of treatment. 
I must, however, give you a short account of his 
first antiseptic method, which was founded on the 
discoveries of Pasteur, and explain in what way and 
for what reasons he afterwards modified it. If I 
succeed in making this clear it will be easy to under- 
stand how the relinquishment of much that he at first 
considered essential, but which later discoveries proved 
to be superfluous, led others to give up still more 
—much more than he ever considered it prudent to 
do. It will then be maintained that what he feared 
has come true: that the results obtained to-day, good 
though they are, are not so good as they would be 
if we were to return, perhaps not altogether, but 
almost, ‘to those simpler and safer methods which 
Lister employed at the end of his active career. 
Let us begin by trying to place ourselves in Lister’s 
position during the years preceding 1865, when the 
writings of Pasteur were first brought to his notice. 
It was that of every thoughtful surgeon in those days. 
Of all the dealings of Providence with men—remember 
I am speaking of sixty years ago—not the least 
mysterious appeared to be the ordinance that the life- 
giving air, heaven’s blessed breeze, without which 
life cannot be maintained for more than a few 
minutes, and on the purity of which man’s vigour 
depends, should carry in some unexplained way the 
seeds of death and disease, being one day the doctor’s 
greatest friend and the next his deadliest foe. 
Physicians were quite sure that the acute specific 
fevers, such as scarlet fever and measles, were carried 
on the wings of the wind, and few had any doubt 
that cholera was borne by the same vehicle. Surgeons 
were equally certain that erysipelas should be placed 
in the same class as the acute specific fevers and that 
the suppuration of wounds depended upon the same 
agency. It seemed quite obvious, to anyone who 
thought about the difference in the behaviour of simple 
and compound fractures, that is, fractures with un- 
broken skin and those which are complicated by the 
presence of a wound. Except for this complication the 
fractures might be identical, but, in pre-antiseptic 
1 Discourse delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday, March 12, by 
Sir R. J. Godlee, Bart., K.C.V.O. 
NOE 2371; VOL. 95] 

days, the presence of a wound was almost certain to 
lead to suppuration of a serious, if not a dangerous 
nature. 
Old Glasgow students speak of Lister contemplating 
a simple fracture of the leg; the muscles torn and 
pulped, the limb swollen and shiny, black and blue, 
and pointing out to them that all this destruction 
of tissue and extravasation of blood would be surely 
and safely dealt with by the kindly influences of 
nature; but that the admission of the air through the 
smallest wound in the skin would completely change 
the prospect; the extravasated blood would soon stink, 
the injured tissues—bone and muscle—would die, and 
suppuration would take place, which might possibly 
infect the whole system. It did not enter into the 
mind of anyone, therefore, to doubt the morbific in- 
fluence of the air. It was one of those things which 
appear so obvious that for a time they form the very 
foundations of belief, such as that the earth is flat 
and that the sun rises, matters which in more bar- 
barous times laid sceptics open to the rigours of the 
Inquisition. 
This was still the universal belief when Pasteur’s 
discoveries were made known. Pasteur put the finish- 
ing touch to the work of many observers, who, during 
the first half of the last century, had been striving 
to find out what there was in the atmosphere which 
gave rise to fermentations of all sorts, and amongst 
others to that form of fermentation known as putre- 
faction. So long as fermentation and putrefaction 
were looked upon as chemical processes it was natural 
to suppose that one of the gaseous constituents of 
the air was the cause. But clear thinkers, like John 
Hunter, saw that this could not be the case. 
There are two surgical conditions-that prove this :— 
(1) If a rib be broken and a sharp fragment injures 
the lung, large quantities of air may pass from the 
lung into the pleural cavity, but if the lung be healthy, 
decomposition never occurs in the putrescible fluid that 
is always present in the pleura in small quantity. 
(2) If air passes into the cellular tissue of the body, 
as it sometimes does after the same accident, or some 
other injury of the air passages, large portions of 
the body may be distended by it to an extent that 
appears alarming. But again, as the air is effectually 
filtered on the way, decomposition does not occur and 
the evil result is only a temporary mechanical one. 
Investigators, therefore, began to think that the 
cause of fermentation must be something solid and 
possibly living; something so small that it eluded 
their highest magnifying glasses, and so they adopted 
different lines of attack. 
Some calcined the air, some filtered it, some passed it 
through causic fluids. There was an old French confec- 
tioner named Appert—Citoyen Appert, in the time of the 
Republic, who anticipated by many years the work of 
our modern fruit preservers. He succeeded in pre- 
serving all sorts of focd in well-corked bottles by 
boiling them for various lengths of time according 
to the particular article he was dealing with; and 
his results were so nearly uniform and so remarkable, 
from an economic as well as from a scientific point: 
of view, that they attracted the attention of the French 
Minister of the Interior in 1810, and also of the 
Académie Francaise. 
Unscientific as these observations were, they gave 
an impetus to the work of chemists and biologists 
who carried out an enormous number of really scien- 
tific investigations in consequence. These were re- 
peated by Pasteur, who made countless others of his 
own, of marvellous ingenuity. The results of his 
labours in this particular field before 1865 may be 
given in a tabular form. He showed that :— 
(1) Putrefaction is a species of fermentation. 
