46 VETERINARY SURGICAL THERAPEUTICS. 
III. ‘ 
SURGICAL ANTISEPSIS AND ASEPSIS. 
Although infectious complications of traumatism have, at all times, | 
occupied the attention of surgeons, until modern times surgical art 
was powerless to prevent them, because their nature and their par- 
ticular cause were unknown. In the first part of this century, they 
were supposed to be due to the action, upon the exposed wounds, 
of the impurity and vicious condition of the atmosphere of hospitals, 
or of the air loaded with the miasmas of putrefaction. The labors of 
Pasteur and of Tyndall seemed to justify the correctness of this 
idea, although they showed that it is not the air itself which pos- 
sesses injurious properties, but the germs that it contains in sus- 
pension. 
While organic substances exposed to the action of the air enter 
immediately into fermentation, they do not undergo any kind of 
alteration in contact with air opically pure, which has been filtered 
through wadding. It is the animated atoms, the germs in suspen- 
sion in the atmosphere, the mcrobes, which give rise to the decom- 
position of those‘substances and to the putrefaction which is devel- 
oped in the tissues as soon as life has left them. Without micro- 
‘germs there would be no decomposition or:‘no putrefaction. Logic- 
ally, it became evident that the same process ought to take place in 
wounded structures, exposed to the action of air, and of its germs. 
The phenomena which characterize septic complications of wounds 
should be essentially those occurring in fermentations. 
The first important researches made for the purpose of preventing 
these complications are comparatively recent. It was in 1861 that 
Lister, inspired by the labors of Pasteur upon the subject of fermen- 
tation, made the experiments which brought him to conceive of the 
antisepiic method ; and in 1870, A. Guerin, guided by the same dis- 
coveries and those of Tyndall, originated the wadded dressing. It 
is but just to say, that in 1865, Lefort had already said that conta- 
gion is the great cause of those complications. 
Guerin, in the case of wounds, realized the experimental condi- 
tions which. protect organic matter from the alterations of which the 
_ micro-organisms of the air are the agents ; with thick layers of wad- 
ding he protected the divided tissues from the action of germs. 
Lister had for object to destroy, with chemical agents, the microbes 
which corrupted the wound or which might be deposited in it dur- 
ing the operation ; he rendered the. wound aseptic and then pro- 
tected it by a true germicide obstacle. 
Let us first consider the wadded dressing. 
At first Guerin did not attempt to obtain immediate union ; he 
