Modern surgery and its making : a tribute to Listerism / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Caleb Saleeby
Date:
[1911]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Modern surgery and its making : a tribute to Listerism / by C.W. Saleeby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    43/378 (page 29)
    see, microbes are not generated except from previous microbes, and previous microbes of the same species. Each surgical patient has to fear other patients. His danger is the danger of infection just precisely as if he were a healthy person lying in bed beside a sufferer from cholera or plague. In surgery as it was, the surgeons and the nurses were the most deadly enemies of their patients, once the deadly microbes made their appearance. So long as no patient harboured them, all was well, but once the infection made its appear- ance in a ward its habit was to spread until all the others were involved. Microbes are not insects and have no wings ; they can move to some extent in fluids, but otherwise when they move it is because they are conveyed. To some limited extent they are conveyed by the air, but the more we learn the less importance we attach to air-borne infection. Air- borne usually means insect-borne, as we now know for malaria and yellow fever, and plague and sleeping- sickness. Surgical infections were conveyed mostly by fingers and sponges, and the conditions which obtained in surgical wards were similar to those which were to be found in Maternity Hospitals. The particular microbes most to be dreaded might be absent and then all was well, but if once they made their appearance in a single case, they were soon everywhere. That case was dressed and then the infection was systematically conveyed on sponges and fingers and the like to every other patient in the place. These conditions obtained in ordinary sur- gery ; they obtained, it need hardly be said, in the surgery of war. We may briefly describe as most typical the dis- ease called pyaemia, which raged everywhere in the old days, but which has now become so uncommon