ready in 1860 a population of 390,000. Its streets
were narrow, its houses often insanitary. In the haste to make money its
citizens had little time to think of air and open spaces. The science of
town-planning was unborn. Its hospital, far from having any special
advantage of position, was exposed to peculiar dangers. It lay on the
edge of the old cathedral graveyard, where the victims of cholera had
received promiscuous pit-burial only ten years before. The uppermost
tier of a multitude of coffins reached to within a few inches of the
surface. These horrors have long been swept away; but, when Lister took
charge of his wards in the Infirmary, they were infected by the
poisonous air generated so close at hand, and in consequence they
presented a gruesome appearance. The patients came from streets which
often were foul with dirt, smoke, and disease, and were admitted to
gloomy airless wards, where pyaemia or gangrene were firmly established.
In such an environment certain death seemed to await them.

Though his heart must have sunk within him, Lister set himself bravely
to the task of fighting these grim adversaries. For two years, indeed,
he was chiefly occupied with routine work and practical improvements;
but he continued his speculations, and in 1861 an article on amputations
which he contributed to the _System of Surgery_, a large work in four
volumes published in London, showed that he had not lost his power of
surveying questions broadly and examining them with a fresh and original
insight. He was not in danger of letting his mind be swamped with
details, but could put them in their place and subordinate them to
principles; and his article is chiefly directed to a philosophical
survey which would enable his readers to go through the same process of
education which he had followed out for himself. Sir Hector Cameron, the
most constant of his Glasgow disciples, once illustrated this
philosophic spirit from a passage in Cicero contrasting the many
scientists who 'render themselves familiar with the strange' (not
realizing that it is strange or needs explanation) with the few who
'render themselves strange to the familiar'--who stand away from the
phenomena to which every one has become too accustomed and examine them
afresh for themselves. In Lister he recognized the peculiar gift which
enabled him to rise superior to his subject, and to interpret what was
to his colleagues a sealed book. In these days, among the too