848 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
REMARKS ON MICRO-ORGANISMS: THEIR RELATION TO 
DISEASE.* 
By Joseph Lister, F.R.S., Professor of Clinical Surgery in King’s 
College, London. 
The relation of micro-organisms to disease is a subject of 
vast extent and importance. If we compare the present 
state of knowledge regarding it with that of twenty years 
ago, we are astonished at the progress which has been made 
in the interval. At that time bacteria were little more than 
scientific curiosities; whether they were animal or vegetable, 
few people knew or cared; but most regarded them as animals 
on account of the active movements which they often exhibited. 
That they were causes of putrefaction, or other fermentative 
changes, was a thing not thought of; and the notion that they 
had special relations to disease would have been regarded as 
the wildest of speculations. Now, however, a mass of infor¬ 
mation has been accumulated regarding all these points, of 
which it would be hopeless for me to attempt to give even a 
brief sketch in the time at my disposal; and all that I can do 
is to present to the Pathological Section a few examples 
illustrating the progress which is being made in this depart¬ 
ment of research. 
First, I will mention some examples of the labours of Dr. 
Koch, of Wollstein, in Germany. Though a hard-worked 
general practitioner, Koch has continued to devote an immense 
amount of time and energy to his investigations; and by a 
combination of well-planned experiments, ingenious methods 
of staining bacteria out of proportion to the tissues among 
which they lie, a beautiful adaptation of optical principles to 
render the coloured object discernible by the human eye, 
and, further, by a most successful application of micro-photo¬ 
graphy, he has succeeded in demonstrating the presence of 
these minute organisms in a manner never before attained. 
The Bacillus anthracis is now universally recognised among 
pathologists as the cause of splenic fever, so fatal among 
cattle in this and other countries, and capable of being com¬ 
municated to various other animals, and, among the rest, to 
the human species, as has been lately illustrated by the so- 
* Address delivered before the Pathological Section in opening a dis¬ 
cussion on the subject at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical 
Association in Cambridge, August 12th, 1880. 
