So common was this, particularly in old, ill-equipped hospitals, that
many surgeons feared to operate, and the general mortality in all
surgical cases was very high. Believing that it was from outside that
the germs came which caused the decomposition of wounds, just as
from the atmosphere the sugar solution got the germs which caused the
fermentation, a young surgeon in Glasgow, Joseph Lister, applied the
principles of Pasteur's experiments to their treatment. From Lister's
original paper(*) I quote the following: "Turning now to the question
how the atmosphere produces decomposition of organic substances, we find
that a flood of light has been thrown upon this most important subject
by the philosophic researches of M. Pasteur, who has demonstrated by
thoroughly convincing evidence that it is not to its oxygen or to any of
its gaseous constituents that the air owes this property, but to minute
particles suspended in it, which are the germs of various low forms
of life, long since revealed by the microscope, and regarded as merely
accidental concomitants of putrescence, but now shown by Pasteur to
be its essential cause, resolving the complex organic compounds into
substances of simpler chemical constitution, just as the yeast-plant
converts sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid.
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