Lister Centenary Exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum : Handbook 1927.

  • Wellcome Historical Medical Museum.
Date:
1927]
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Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Lister Centenary Exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum : Handbook 1927. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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read an important and interesting paper on The Germ Theory of Putrefaction, full of the most ingenious experiments, for the satisfactory performance of which he had devised the appropriate apparatus. The President, after making very complimentary remarks on the communication, used words like these : I believe we are at the beginning of a new science which, for want of a better name, I may refer to as microscopical horticulture. How far it will go it may be difficult to say. No one at that stage could have predicted its rapid and enormous advance, or foreseen that professorships and lectureships of the subject should now be established, and laboratories built for its pursuit, in almost every school of scientific learning in the world. It is universally recognised that a great truth does not influence most the generation that gave it birth, and holding, as Lister did, that a knowledge and belief in the germ theory was essential to the successful practice of Surgery, he always took care that the students were made conversant with its facts as far as then known. He realised that a belief in these matters, and the evolution of a treatment to obviate sepsis in wounds, was not to be accomplished in a day. As a matter of fact, it has taken at least a generation to reach its present condition of efficiency. The older practitioners were so confirmed in their habits and forms of treatment, that, while perfectly willing to try the effects of a new dressing, they declined to submit themselves to the discipline of the germ doctrine. But Lister had great faith in youth, and it was to his students that he looked for the future success in Surgery of the principles which he was endeavouring to promote. In his earliest efforts in antiseptic treatment he directed his attention to compound fractures. They were at that time the most fatal of all surgical injuries and were responsible for a great many of the cases of pya?mia which were of such frequent occurrence in all hospitals. The method adopted for applying this newly-conceived principle of treatment was as follows : A small piece of calico or lint, thoroughly saturated with undiluted carbolic acid, and held in a pair of dressing forceps, was introduced into the wound, and all its accessible interstices were thoroughly and freely swabbed with it. Two layers of lint, also saturated with the undiluted acid,