June 7, 1918] 



SCIENCE 



563 



one to tliree weeks, but it was extremely 

 doubtful whether death was due to the dye. 



Experiments carried out in this laboratory 

 with three German preparations and one of 

 American make show great variation in gen- 

 eral physical and chemical properties. Melt- 

 ing points vary by as much as 70 degrees, the 

 color of solutions in oil range from a deep 

 orange to a venous red, and their degree of 

 solubility in neutral, alkaline or acid solu- 

 tions is not the same. 



The impure preparations were found in 

 every case to be highly toxic, causing rabbits 

 to die within 24 hours. 



Full details of the completed experiments 

 will be published later. 



B. E. Head 



Yale University 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Lord Lister. By Sm Rickma\ J. Godlee, 



Bart., pp. six, 6761. Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 



London. 1917. 



This is the biography of a man who never 

 wrote a book yet whose work so profoundly 

 transformed surgery that '" Before Lister " and 

 " After Lister " in surgical chronology are the 

 counterparts of B.C. and a.d. in Christian 

 chronology ! 



As a biography the story is too detailed to 

 be easy perusal for the non-medical reader as 

 compared, for example, with Vallery-Radot's 

 " Pasteur " ; but as the authorized biography 

 by Lister's nephew and assistant, who had ac- 

 cess to all his letters, remarkable common- 

 place books and other data, and as a narrative 

 intended to trace the development of Lister's 

 antiseptic system for the enlightenment of the 

 profession in future ages, it is none too long 

 nor too minute. It is more than a biography. 

 It is an important historical document. 



Joseph Lister was born a Quaker and con- 

 tinued in the Society of Friends until his 

 marriage with the daughter of his professor 

 of surgery, Mr. Syme, in 1856, when he with- 

 drew from the society and later joined the 

 Episcopal Church in Scotland. In his corre- 

 spondence with his family, however, he always 

 used the plain language, but in a form which 



differs from that of our Philadelphia Friends 

 and often grates upon both eye and ear. He 

 simply replaces "you " by " thee," the plural 

 verb being retained, e. g., Thee say, are, have, 

 etc. 



He witnessed the first operation ever per- 

 formed in Great Britain under ether anes- 

 thesia by Liston in December, 1846. Yet as 

 Godlee points out it was hard to displace the 

 old slap-dash surgery which was no longer 

 necessary when pain had been abolished. Yet 

 even in my own student days (1860-62), I 

 have seen stop-watches pulled out to time how 

 many seconds were required by Gross and 

 Pancoast to whip a stone out of the bladder. 



Lister's first work was in anatomy and 

 pathology, especially in inflammation. Few re- 

 member that it was he who in 1853 first dem- 

 onstrated the circular and the radiating mus- 

 cular fibers in the iris. 



A visit to Edinburgh for observation 

 changed his whole life, for he settled there 

 first as a student, then as an extra-mural 

 lecturer, and there found his model wife whose 

 death in 1893 was such a terrible blow to 

 him. 



In 1860 he was appointed regius professor 

 of surgery in Glasgow. The very next year 

 he attributed suppuration not to the oxygen 

 of the air as all the chemists and everybody 

 else were teaching, but to fermentation. His 

 first two papers introducing the antiseptic 

 system were not published until 1867. 



Sir Rickman gives an excellent account of 

 the warfare on "hospitalism" and puerperal 

 fever by Simpson, Eriehsen and Semmelweiss, 

 but does not even mention our own Holmes, 

 whose finger pointed the way as early as 1843. 

 The echoes of his battle royal with Meigs and 

 Hodge, of Philadelphia, were still reverbera- 

 ting when I was pursuing my medical studies. 

 The methods of treatment of woimds which I 

 was taught, and which I practised during the 

 Civil War and down to 1876, are well de- 

 scribed. Then follows a discu.ssion of fer- 

 mentation and putrefaction, and next the his- 

 tory of the rise and progress of Lister's anti- 

 septic system, its modifications and its even- 

 tual triumph. 



