Lister / [Research Defence Society].

  • Research Defence Society (Great Britain)
Date:
[1916]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lister / [Research Defence Society]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    methods was possible. Some surgeons were content, more or less, to believe that the fearful death-rate among operation cases was “ inevitable”; some few talked as if it were a matter of “ chance ” or of “ luck”; but nine out of ten were longing and striving for clearer knowledge. What was infection? It must be something that could hang about a place or hang about a person; something transferable, something divisible, something with a. sort of life of its own, and with diversities of character; something in the air, but not only m the air. If only they could see it under the micro-scope ! If only they could isolate and cultivate and observe it, all by itself, outside the human body! Then came Pasteur, and showed them that they could. During the years 1860-1865 the “ germ-theory ” was linked-up, more or less closely, with the general way o-f thinking of infective diseases. Men began to feel fairly sure that these germs were, indeed, what used to be called the contagium vivum, or the materies morbi; that they were the true cause of diseases, the living agent, the thing itself. But none of the specific germs— such as cholera, plague, typhoid, diphtheria, tubercle—had yet bsen discovered. The only germs discovered were the “ germs of putrefaction,” the germs which, if they get into a flask contain¬ ing broth, milk, urine, blood, or any such organic fluid, make it go bad.” The existence of the specific germs was guessed at, but not proved. Even the “ germs of putrefaction,” though they had been discovered, had not been strictly classified; nor did men know what we know now, that putrefaction, stench, foulness depend not so much on the germs which start the process of in¬ fection as on the subsequent invasion of the organic fluid by further armies of other germs. Thus the phrase “the germs of putrefaction ” was more suggestive fifty years ago than it is now. Still, men’s minds were prepared, for some years before Lister’s work, to think of germs in association with infection. The address given by Sir Spencer Wells, in the summer of .1864, at the annual meeting in Cambridge of the British Medical Associa¬ tion, comes very near to “ Listerism.” Nor was the use of anti¬ septics of itself anything new. Lemaire’s use of carbolic acid, for example, was founded, more or less, on the germ theory ; but it was vague and uncritical in practice. All sorts of anti¬ septic or disinfectant lotions and washes were being used in surgery; iodine, alcohol, camphorated water, and so forth. Everybody had his own way of “cleansing” wounds already infected past all such cleansing. Poultices, heavily laden with germs, were applied to wounds as bad as themselves. The hands o-f the surgeons, dressers, and nurses, and the sponges and instru¬ ments end towels, were not always clean in the ordinary sense of the word; the arrangements in hospitals for baths and lavatories and pu~e air were bad; uncertainty, and mere guessing, and false theories about the “ intemperature ofi the weather ” and the “ un¬ healthiness of the air” and the “constitutional tendencies of the patient’’—these fallacies and errors were wrecking the work of