Quaker contributions to medicine & public health / by Cyril C. Barnard.

  • Cyril Cuthbert Barnard
Date:
[1938]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Quaker contributions to medicine & public health / by Cyril C. Barnard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1852 and next year proceeded to Edinburgh, where he received a cordial welcome from Professor Syme, whose house-surgeon he became, and whose eldest daughter Agnes he married in 1856. The Symes were members of the Episcopalian Church, and Lister, to avoid being dissociated for marrying out, resigned his membership of the Society of Friends and joined his wife’s church. This, however, was not done lightly or without due consideration ; and Lister seems to have been happy in his adopted church, of which he remained a member for the rest of his life. In i860 Lister went to Glasgow as Professor of Surgery, and it was soon after this that he began to make the researches upon antiseptic surgery that have made his name famous. He had already made valuable scientific contributions in his papers on coagulation of the blood, on the contractile tissue of the iris, and on a new method of excising the wrist. His mind was prepared, and he had already had a long and varied surgical experience. His sensitive, kindly nature was appalled at the enor¬ mous amount of death and suffering due to sepsis in the surgical wards. Blood poisoning, erysipelas, pyaemia, septicaemia and hospital gangrene were terribly rife, while simple suppuration of a wound was so common as to be regarded as normal, and called ‘‘laudable pus.” About 1861 Lister began to teach publicly that the occurrence of suppuration in a wound was caused ‘‘simply by the influence of decomposition” ; but, as long as this was thought to be caused by the oxygen or by ‘‘miasms” in the air, all attempts to prevent it seemed hopeless. It was about 1864 that his attention was first drawn to the writings of Pasteur, which revealed to him that putrefaction is in fact a fermentation caused by the growth of microscopic air-borne organisms. The
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