A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



- " Ta the solid ground 

 Of Nature trusts tlu- liiind -ivhich builds for aye.^^ — Wordsworth. 



SCIENTIFIC WORTHIES. 

 X.XIX. — Sir Joseph Lister. 



IH.W'E responded with great pleasure to the honour- 

 able request that I should give some sketch, for the 

 readers of Nature, of Sir Joseph Listers scientific 

 eminence. As a confrere I know him not merely from 

 his prominent scientific renown, but also as a friend, and 

 I too, like other German surgeons, ha\ e sought out the 

 founder of modern surgery in his London hospital and, 

 filled with gratitude, have laid my homage at his feet. 

 Lister was many years ago in Leipzig, and I shall never 

 forget the fete we then organised in his honour. How 

 we cheered him on that evening, professors and students, 

 old and young ! For was it not in Germany first, rather 

 than in England, that his scientific works met with their 

 earliest recognition and general appreciation ! Lister 

 was in his day a prophet, and proclaimed a new doctrine 

 for the healing of wounds. And how often prophets fail 

 to find in their own fatherland, especially m the early 

 stages of their activity, the recognition they so well 

 deserve I 



Listers immortal life-work is his antiseptic method of 

 Operating and of treating wounds, and it constitutes the 

 greatest advance which surgery has ever made. It is 

 true that operational technique had reached a previously 

 undreamt of development after chloroform and ether had 

 banished pain in 1846 and 1847. But the. surgery of 

 those days wanted one thing more — certainty of a 

 successful issue to its operations. Surgeons were still 

 helpless in fighting the ever-present septicremic in- 

 fection of wounds, which snatched to the grave so many 

 patients and injured sufferers. Were they but able to 

 circumvent this deadly infection of the bodily fluids, the 

 blood and the lymph, and could they but secure as a rule 

 and not the exception the rcactionless liealing of wounds 

 without inflammation and suppuration, then would 

 surgery as an art be diverted into new channels, and 

 strive for the goal of final perfection. It was exactly 

 Lister's antiseptic method of operating and treating 

 NO. 1384, VOL. 54] 



wounds which first showed the way to the attainment 

 of that healing "by first intention," which had been a 

 subject of discussion for centuries, and of that certain 

 avoidance of traumatic infection of which the general 

 nature was so well known. And now every day we note, 

 with joyful and grateful hearts, and with hitherto unknown 

 feelings of innermost satisfaction, the splendid outcome 

 of this the greatest acquisition of modern surgery. 

 Lister did not create antiseptic surgery suddenly, 

 or without means to his hand, for the path was 

 already smoothed with invaluable scientific facts from 

 the domains of physiology, chemistry, botany, and 

 general experimental pathology. Schulze, Schwann, 

 Helmh'oltz, Schroedeiy Dusch, and, above all, Pasteur 

 had proved that all fermentations- and putrefactions 

 are due to organised germs, to those ever-present 

 micro-organisms the schizomycetes or bacteria. This 

 fact had at first received only scant attention, but in 

 Lister's hands its irivportance for the development of 

 surgery was immense. He began his experiments on the 

 treatment of wounds in the Glasgow Infirmary, some- 

 whei'e about the year if854, and characterised his method 

 as " antiseptic," smce it was conscioiisly and confidently 

 aimed at the avoidance of all putrefactive changes in the 

 parts affected. In his views as to the nature of traumatic 

 infection. Lister took' his stand on the basis of those 

 scientific facts regarding fermentation and putrefaction 

 which, as already stated, had been "thoroughly estab- 

 lished. He said to himself, " It is not the' mere air as 

 such that is antagonistic to,, the process of healing a 

 wound, but ■ rather those organised germs which are so 

 universally disseminated' in the world'around us : bacteria 

 are the cause of all inflammation and suppuration, and 

 hence of septicaemia." In this persuasion he directly 

 attacked the problem of how not only to exclude bacteria 

 from entering a wound, but also to destroy by dis- 

 infectants those already present, and to stay their further 

 development. Lister selected carbolic acid as a dis- 

 infectant. Now it is true that even before his time 

 various antiseptics, and among these carbolic acid, had 

 been employed in bandaging ; but to Lister alone is due 

 the unending merit of methodically and confidently work- 

 ing out the detailed technique of antiseptic operating 

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