Six papers / by Lord Lister ; with a short biography and explanatory notes by Sir Rickman J. Godlee.

  • Joseph Lister
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Six papers / by Lord Lister ; with a short biography and explanatory notes by Sir Rickman J. Godlee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of spontaneous generation. In this field he completed and extended the work of a long* series of distinguished chemists and biologists, some of whom had made shrewd guesses as to the nature of fermentation and had almost set at rest the conflict over spontaneous generation. Pasteur s brilliant experiments and sound reasoning* definitely settled the question of fermentation. As far as spontaneous generation is concerned lie showed that under ordinary circumstances it never does take place, but it is, of course, impossible for anyone to prove that life never can, under any conceivable circumstances, start de novo in inorganic substances. All the world recognized the value of Pasteur’s studies in crystallography. Our own Royal Society had awarded him its Rumford medal as early as 1856. But his work on fermentation does not seem to have attracted so much notice in this country. Surely, however, it must have been known to some practical surgeons in Great Britain before Lister’s attention was, so to say, casually drawn to it by the Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow in 1864. Perhaps not; for surgeons were not great readers of foreign literature. Whether they had heard of them or not, however, the possibility of applying Pasteur’s discoveries to the prevention of hospital diseases appears to have struck no one, with the possible exception of Spencer Wells. This may have been because Pasteur was a chemist and it did not occur to doctors that his work could have any direct relation to medicine. It may have been because no one had yet really reached Lister’s standpoint of recognizing that suppuration in wounds depended on decomposition and that the nature and cause of decomposition were still unexplained and unaccounted for. The particular parts of Pasteur's discoveries, which shone for Lister like the first gleams of sunrise, were that decomposition was a form of fermentation and
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