tary hospitals, from thirty to fifty per cent of all the wounded
received were attacked, and over five thousand cases were formally
reported during the war, of which nearly fifty per cent died. This
plague was born solely of those two great mothers of evils, ignorance
and dirt, and is to-day, in civilized lands, as extinct as the dodo.
Then the dread that the community had of hospitals, as places that "help
the poor to die," in Browning's phrase, had a certain amount of
foundation; and cases operated upon in a farmhouse kitchen, where no one
in the family happened to have had a boil or a catarrh or a festering
cut within a month or so, and where the knife happened to be clean or
new, would recover with less suppuration than hospital cases. Nowadays,
from incessant and eternal vigilance, a hospital is surgically the
cleanest and safest place in the world for an operation, so that most
surgeons decline to operate outside of one, except in emergencies; and
some will not even operate except in one with which they are personally
connected, so that they know every step in the process of protection.

It was this terrible risk of the surgeon carrying infection from one
case to another, that made the coroner of London declare, barely sixty
years ago, that he would hold an inquest upon the next case of death
after ovariotomy that was reported to him, on account of the fearful
pus-mortality that followed this serious operation, which now has a
possible death-rate from all causes connected with the operation of only
a fraction of one per cent.

The brusque reply is still remembered of Lawson Tait, the great English
ovariotomist, to a distinguished German colleague, who had inquired the
secret of his then marvelously low death-rate: after a glance at the
bands of mourning on the ends of the other's fingers, he said, "I keep
my fingernails clean, sir!" There was sadly too much truth in the saying
of another eminent surgeon, that in the pre-Listerian days many a poor
woman's death warrant was written under the fingernails of her surgeon.
This reproach has been wiped out, thank Heaven! but the labor, pains,
and persistence after heart-breaking failures which it took to do it!
Never was there a more vivid illustration of the declaration that genius
is the capacity for taking pains, than antiseptic surgery! Not a
loophole must be left unstopped, not a possibility unconsidered, not a
thing in, or about, or connected with, the operating-ro