without anything
further being done, has in many instances resulted in decided
amelioration of a morbid condition, if not in its cure. A striking
example of this is seen in the benefit that often results in cases of
one form of "consumption of the bowels," namely, tuberculous disease of
the membrane that lines the abdominal wall and invests the abdominal
organs. This is not the only operation that does good mysteriously; that
of cutting out a bit of the iris in a form of deep-seated eye disease,
glaucoma, that tends toward complete blindness, is hardly more
explicable; neither is an incision of the capsule of the kidney for
certain forms of Bright's disease, each of which stays the progress of
the trouble in a goodly proportion of instances.

Another of the great divisions of the healing art, that of midwifery,
has been enhanced quite as much as general surgery by the employment of
Listerism. The process of childbirth, although a perfectly natural one,
almost necessarily carries with it a certain amount of laceration, and,
through the wound surfaces thus produced, absorption of poisonous
material was formerly so frequent that puerperal fever figured
prominently in mortality reports. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes--a
graduate in medicine and a professor in the Harvard Medical School,
though we are accustomed to think of him only as a delightful
writer--who first declared that puerperal fever was the product of
infection from without the body, and Semmelweis demonstrated the truth
of the proposition. Holmes was a teacher of physiology, and his study of
that branch of medical science was in itself enough to convince him of
the doctrine which he inculcated.

Listerism must be credited, not only with having added immensely to the
safety of the major operations of surgery, but also with having led to
great improvement of their technics by reason of the greatly increased
frequency with which it has come to be thought justifiable to practise
them; what we do again and again we are apt in the end to do well,
whereas that which we turn to only in despair and as rarely as possible,
we do clumsily and imperfectly. Listerism has been unjustly alleged by
a few to be unworthy of the appreciation in which it is held by the
great majority of medical men of all countries; simple cleanliness, it
has been urged, is quite as efficient as the full Listerian precautions.
This is begging the question, for simple cleanliness, "chemical
cleanlin