The present aspect of the antiseptic question : being the substance of the oration for the year 1883, delivered before the Medical Society of London / by Edward Lund.

  • Lund, Edward.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The present aspect of the antiseptic question : being the substance of the oration for the year 1883, delivered before the Medical Society of London / by Edward Lund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    If the fact be admitted that there is in the atmosphere such a thing as an exciter of putrefaction, and that where the conditions are favourable, this can alter the chemical constitu- tion of the secretions of a wound, we have next to consider what are the conditions which operate thus favourably,— or, perhaps, I ought to say, what are the conditions which are essential for the full development of such change, and the converse of the proposition will then hold good, that by the removal of such conditions the establishment of putrefactive change may be delayed or prevented altogether. Now there are three conditions, all of which must be fulfilled, or be present contemporaneously, to bring about putrefaction in animal tissues or the fluids which they contain. There must be a certain temperature ; there must be moisture; and there must be a proneness to change in the very chemical constitution of the substance which is said to putrefy. We may assume that there is in the atmosphere at all times —there, at least, without our actual knowledge, so that it may act instantly if the conditions are favourable—such an exciter of putrefaction; some subtile power which, when once in action, has the property of starting the process which determines the re-arrangement of the component atoms of many of the complex bodies, viewed in a chemical sense, of which animal tissues are composed. Of course, in this some- what vague but very general term exciter of putrefaction, I refer to those micro-organisms of which we hear so much— those little active disintegrating agents which are the true bacteria. While it is an established fact, confirmed by the most minute and patient observation, that we cannot have putre- faction without the presence of bacteria, there still remains the question as yet unanswered,—Can you not have bacteria without putrefaction ? But how these ever-active organisms determine the commencement and continuance of putrefaction is, I take it, as much an unsettled question now as the modus operandi of the yeast plant—the Tonrfa ccrcvisicc—in deter-