for field-service, came to him for
advice, and he wrote a series of short instructions for their guidance;
but he soon learnt how difficult it was to carry out his methods in the
field, where appliances were inadequate and where wounds often got a
long start before treatment could be applied. The French statistics,
compiled after the war, are appalling to read: 90 out of 100 amputations
proved fatal, and the total number of deaths in hospital worked out at
over 10,000. The Germans were in advance of the French in the
cleanliness of their methods, and some of their doctors were already
beginning to accept the antiseptic theory; but it was not till 1872 that
this principle can be said to have won the day. The hospitals on both
sides were left with a ghastly heritage of pyaemia and other diseases,
raging almost unchecked in their wards; but, in the two years after the
war, two of the most famous professors in German Universities[48] had by
antiseptic methods obtained such striking results among their patients
that the superiority of the treatment was evident; and both of them
generously gave full credit to Lister as their teacher. When he made a
long tour on the Continent in 1875, finishing up with visits to the
chief medical schools in Germany, these men were foremost in greeting
him, and he enjoyed a conspicuous triumph also at Leipzig. Sir Rickman
Godlee, commenting on the indifference of his countrymen, says that
Lister's teaching was by them 'accepted as a novelty, when it came back
to England, refurbished from Germany'. But this was not till after he
had left Edinburgh, to carry the torch of learning to the south.

[Note 48: Professor Volkmann of Halle and Professor von Nussbaum of
Munich.]

In Edinburgh his colleagues, with all their opportunities for learning
at first hand, seemed strangely indifferent to Lister's presence in
their midst, even when foreigners began to make pilgrimages to the
central shrine of antiseptics. The real encouragement which he got came,
as before, from his pupils, who thronged his lecture-room to the number
of three or four hundred, with sustained enthusiasm. In some ways it is
difficult to account for the popularity of his lectures. He made no
elaborate preparations, but was content to devote a quiet half-hour to
thinking out the subject in his arm-chair. After this he needed no
notes, having his ideas and the development of his thought so firmly in
his grasp that he could follow it out