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Pasteur; Lister; Semmelweis.
In the early 1860s these three men knew nothing of each other, but each of them was working towards a discovery which saved millions of lives, revolutionized surgery, gave vast results in matters of our food, and supplied the clue to hundreds of diseases. That discovery was germs, microbes, the minute organisms which could only be seen through the most powerful microscopes, but which bred a life of their own able to destroy the living tissues infected by them.
It was in surgery that the most spectacular results of that discovery were obtained, and it was there that the battle between the new idea and the old prejudices was fought out most dramatically. Its coming into that field changed the whole conditions under which operations were performed, and so enormously extended its possibilities that we reckon the art in two eras: one covering the history of mankind from the earliest times to this time of Lister; the other, the period since. For in ancient India, in Egypt, Greece and Rome, surgery was practiced, and the instruments and knowledge were already remarkable. If it stagnated under mediaeval influences, it revived again under such men as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and moved steadily forward through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as human anatomy and physiology yielded their secrets to the scientists. In the nineteenth century one great discovery came to the aid of the surgeon when James Young Simpson experimented with anasthetics and so gave him time to perform his delicate work on patients unconscious of pain.
But one terrible thing remained wrong.
In every hospital, whether form some original injury or from the surgeons knife, wounds became inflamed, turned gangrenous, or developed some similar terrible degeneration, and in a few days the patient died as the whole blood stream became poisoned. Terrible epidemics of this Hospitalism, as they called it, would sweep through the wards. Often the authorities would deliberately close a hospital for a time to try to stamp out the plague. But always it returned. Even the simplest operationthe removal of a single joint of a finger, the lancing of an abscesswould prove fatal; and no operation was possible on the delicate parts of the human body, for almost inevitably they became infected, and however skilful the surgeon had been the patient died.
In a great Glasgow hospital a brilliant young surgeon named Joseph Lister fought this evil. He was an earnest young man, son of a Quaker family, and he had consecrated his life to find out hoe to procure such a result in all wounds. He had already set his feet along the right track by studying inflammation, making strange experiments with the foot of a frog and the wing of a bat under his microscope.
Pasteur; Lister; Semmelweis.
In the early 1860s these three men knew nothing of each other, but each of them was working towards a discovery which saved millions of lives, revolutionized surgery, gave vast results in matters of our food, and supplied the clue to hundreds of diseases. That discovery was germs, microbes, the minute organisms which could only be seen through the most powerful microscopes, but which bred a life of their own able to destroy the living tissues infected by them.
It was in surgery that the most spectacular results of that discovery were obtained, and it was there that the battle between the new idea and the old prejudices was fought out most dramatically. Its coming into that field changed the whole conditions under which operations were performed, and so enormously extended its possibilities that we reckon the art in two eras: one covering the history of mankind from the earliest times to this time of Lister; the other, the period since. For in ancient India, in Egypt, Greece and Rome, surgery was practiced, and the instruments and knowledge were already remarkable. If it stagnated under mediaeval influences, it revived again under such men as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and moved steadily forward through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as human anatomy and physiology yielded their secrets to the scientists. In the nineteenth century one great discovery came to the aid of the surgeon when James Young Simpson experimented with anasthetics and so gave him time to perform his delicate work on patients unconscious of pain.
But one terrible thing remained wrong.
In every hospital, whether form some original injury or from the surgeons knife, wounds became inflamed, turned gangrenous, or developed some similar terrible degeneration, and in a few days the patient died as the whole blood stream became poisoned. Terrible epidemics of this Hospitalism, as they called it, would sweep through the wards. Often the authorities would deliberately close a hospital for a time to try to stamp out the plague. But always it returned. Even the simplest operationthe removal of a single joint of a finger, the lancing of an abscesswould prove fatal; and no operation was possible on the delicate parts of the human body, for almost inevitably they became infected, and however skilful the surgeon had been the patient died.
In a great Glasgow hospital a brilliant young surgeon named Joseph Lister fought this evil. He was an earnest young man, son of a Quaker family, and he had consecrated his life to find out hoe to procure such a result in all wounds. He had already set his feet along the right track by studying inflammation, making strange experiments with the foot of a frog and the wing of a bat under his microscope.
