essed the secret; but guessing, in science, is far enough from
knowing. Now, for the first time, the world KNEW, and medicine had taken
another gigantic stride towards the heights of exact science.

LISTER AND ANTISEPTIC SURGERY

Meantime, in a different though allied field of medicine there had
been a complementary growth that led to immediate results of even more
practical importance. I mean the theory and practice of antisepsis in
surgery. This advance, like the other, came as a direct outgrowth of
Pasteur's fermentation studies of alcoholic beverages, though not at
the hands of Pasteur himself. Struck by the boundless implications of
Pasteur's revelations regarding the bacteria, Dr. Joseph Lister (the
present Lord Lister), then of Glasgow, set about as early as 1860 to
make a wonderful application of these ideas. If putrefaction is always
due to bacterial development, he argued, this must apply as well to
living as to dead tissues; hence the putrefactive changes which occur
in wounds and after operations on the human subject, from which
blood-poisoning so often follows, might be absolutely prevented if the
injured surfaces could be kept free from access of the germs of decay.

In the hope of accomplishing this result, Lister began experimenting
with drugs that might kill the bacteria without injury to the patient,
and with means to prevent further access of germs once a wound was freed
from them. How well he succeeded all the world knows; how bitterly
he was antagonized for about a score of years, most of the world has
already forgotten. As early as 1867 Lister was able to publish results
pointing towards success in his great project; yet so incredulous were
surgeons in general that even some years later the leading surgeons
on the Continent had not so much as heard of his efforts. In 1870 the
soldiers of Paris died, as of old, of hospital gangrene; and when,
in 1871, the French surgeon Alphonse Guerin, stimulated by Pasteur's
studies, conceived the idea of dressing wounds with cotton in the hope
of keeping germs from entering them, he was quite unaware that a
British contemporary had preceded him by a full decade in this effort at
prevention and had made long strides towards complete success. Lister's
priority, however, and the superiority of his method, were freely
admitted by the French Academy of Sciences, which in 1881 officially
crowned his achievement, as the Royal Society of London had done the
year befo