Lord Lister, the discoverer of antiseptic surgery / by C.J.S. Thompson.

  • Charles Thompson
Date:
1934
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lord Lister, the discoverer of antiseptic surgery / by C.J.S. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    It was not until 1865 that Lister's attention was drawn to Pasteur’s researches by his colleague Dr. Thomas Anderson, Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow University, and they produced a profound impression on him. For several years he had been pondering over the question why wounds should occasionally heal by first intention but all too frequently should become suppurating and putrid. This was the vital problem he had set himself to solve and he at once recognised the importance of Pasteur’s work and the bearing it might have upon the question of suppuration and wound infection. Later on, he wrote a letter to the Lancet calling attention to the great light Pasteur’s researches had thrown on the matter of decomposition in exposed organic substances. Pasteur, he said, had convincingly demonstrated that the contaminating properties of air were not due to its gaseous constituents as had for many years been the belief, but were due to the minute germs of various low forms of life contained in it and long since revealed to us by the microscope. These previously had been regarded as merely the accidental contaminations of putrescence but had now been shown by Pasteur to be their essential cause. But of all Pasteur’s discoveries none impressed Lister more than his demonstration that the organisms which produce fermentation and putrefaction are carried on particles ot dust floating in the atmosphere, and that these particles of dust could be destroyed by heat or filtered off by cotton-wool, or intercepted in the finely drawn-out necks of flasks through which free ingress and egress of air take place owing to the diurnal variations in temperature. Hardly less inter¬ esting was the proof that these particles of dust are more abundant in some places than others and that while plentiful in dusty rooms, they are absent in undisturbed cellars and on mountain tops. Another important point which impressed Lister was, that Pasteur showed more clearly than any other