Scientific worthies : [No.] 29, Sir Joseph Lister / [Hermann Tillmanns].

  • Tillmanns, Hermann, 1844-1927.
Date:
[1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Scientific worthies : [No.] 29, Sir Joseph Lister / [Hermann Tillmanns]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. “ To the solid ground Of Nature trusts the mind, which builds for aye.”—Wordsworth. THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1896. SCIENTIFIC WORTHIES. XXIX.—Sir Joseph Lister. HAVE x-esponded with great pleasure to the honour¬ able request that I should give some sketch, for the readers of Nature, of Sir Joseph Lister’s scientific eminence. As a confrere I know him not merely from his prominent scientific renown, but also as a friend, and I too, like other German surgeons, have sought out the founder of modern surgery in his London hospital and, filled with gratitude, have laid my homage at his feet. Lister was many years ago in Leipzig, and I shall never forget the fete we then organised in his honour. How we cheered him on that evening, professors and students, old and young ! For was it not in Germany first, rather than in England, that his scientific works met with their earliest recognition and general appreciation ! Lister was in his day a prophet, and proclaimed a new doctrine for the healing of wounds. And how often prophets fail to find in their own fatherland, especially in the early stages of their activity, the recognition they so well deserve! . Lister’s immortal life-work is his antiseptic method of operating and of treating wounds, and it constitutes the greatest advance which surgery has ever made. It is true that operational technique had reached a previously undreamt of development after chloroform and ether had banished pain in 1846 and 1847. But the surgery of those days wanted one thing more—certainty of a successful issue to its operations. Surgeons were still helpless in fighting the ever-present septictemic in¬ fection of wounds, which snatched to the grave so many patients and injured sufferers. Were they but able to circumvent this deadly infection of the bodily fluids, the blood and the lymph, and could they but secure as a rule and not the exception the reactionless healing of wounds without inflammation and suppuration, then would surgery as an art be diverted into new channels, and strive for the goal of final perfection. It was exactly Lister's antiseptic method of operating and treating NO. 1384, VOL. 54] wounds which first showed the way to the attainment of that healing “by first intention,” which had been a subject of discussion for centuries, and of that certain avoidance of traumatic infection of which the general nature was so well known. And now every day we note, with joyful and grateful hearts, and with hitherto unknown feelings of innermost satisfaction, the splendid outcome of this the greatest acquisition of modern surgery. Lister did not create antiseptic surgery suddenly, or without means to his hand, for the path was already smoothed with invaluable scientific facts from the domains of physiology, chemistry, botany, and general experimental pathology. Schulze, Schwann, Helmholtz, Schroeder, Dusch, and, above all, Pasteur had proved that all fermentations and putrefactions are due to organised germs, to those ever-present micro-organisms the schizomycetes or bacteria. This fact had at first received only scant attention, but in Lister’s hands its importance for the development of surgery was immense. He began his experiments on the treatment of wounds in the Glasgow Infirmary, some¬ where about the year 1864, and characterised his method as “antiseptic,” since it was consciously and confidently aimed at the avoidance of all putrefactive changes in the parts affected. In his views as to the nature of traumatic infection, Lister took his stand on the basis of those scientific facts regarding fermentation and putrefaction which, as already stated, had been thoroughly estab¬ lished. He said to himself, “ It is not the mere air as such that is antagonistic to the process of healing a wound, but rather those organised germs which are so universally disseminated in the world around us : bacteria are the cause of all inflammation and suppuration, and hence of septicaemia.” In this persuasion he directly attacked the problem of how not only to exclude bacteria from entering a wound, but also to destroy by dis¬ infectants those already present, and to stay their further development. Lister selected carbolic acid as a dis¬ infectant. Now it is true that even before his time various antiseptics, and among these carbolic acid, had been employed in bandaging ; but to Lister alone is due the unending merit of methodically and confidently work¬ ing out the detailed technique of antiseptic operating 15