By Horce Shipp
A French chemist in Lille studying why wine and beer turned bad in the vats; an English surgeon in Glasgow desperately fighting to save his patients from the awful scourges of disease as wounds or the incisions from their operations became septic; a Hungarian doctor in Vienna equally desperate at the terrible death-roll of the mothers after the children were born in his maternity hospital.
Pasteur; Lister; Semmelweis.
In the early l860s these three men knew nothing of each other, but each of them was working towards a discovery which saved millions of lives, revolutionized surgery, gave vast results in matters of our food3and supplied the clue to hundreds of diseases-That discovery was germs, microbes the minute organisms which could only be seen through the most powerful microscopes, but which bred a lif of their own able to destroy the living tissues infected by them.
It was in surgery that the most spectacular results of that discovery were obtained, and it was there that the battle between the new idea and the old prejudices was fought out most dramatically. Its coming into that field changed the whole conditions under which operations were performed and so enormously extended its possibilities that we reckon the art in two eras one covering the history of mankind from the earliest times to this time of Lister; the other, the period since. For in ancient India in Egypt, Greece and Rome, surgery was practiced, and the instruments and knowledge were al ready remarkable. If it stagnated under mediaeval influences, it revived again under such men as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and moved steadily forward through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as human anatomy and physiology yielded their secrets scientists. In the nineteenth century one great discovery came to the aid of the surgeon when James Young Simpson experimented with anaesthetics, and so gave him time to perform his delicate work on patients’ unconscious of pain.
. But one terrible thing remained wrong.
In every hospital, whether from some original injury or from the surgeon's knife, wounds became inflamed, turned gangrenous or developed some similar terrible degeneration, and in a few days the patient died as the whole blood stream became poisoned. Terrible epidemics of this ‘Hospitalism’ as they called it, would sweep through the wards .Often the authorities would deliberately close a hospital for a time to try to stamp out the plague but always it returned. Even the simplest operation-the removal of a single joint of anger, the lancing of an abscess-would prove fatal: and no operation was possible on the delicate parts of the human body, for almost inevitably they became infected and however skilful the surgeon had been the patient died.
In a great Glasgow hospital a brilliant young surgeon named Joseph Lister fought this evil. He was an earnest young man, son of a Quaker family and he had consecrated his life to this task of making surgery safe. Once he said, concerning a wound that was healing healthily: ‘it is the main object of my life to and out how to procure such a result in all wounds.' He had already set his feet along the right track10by studying inflammation making Estrange experiments with the foot of a frog and the wing of a bat under his microscope.
Said another great scientist: ‘in the field of observation, chance only favours the mind which is prepared.'
Lister’s mind was marvelously prepared .Other men accepted defeat ；they thought
vaguely that there were gases in the air which caused wounds to become septic . Lister’s own teacher had stated that surgery had reached finality; but Lister worked on. He suspected that there were minute organisms which entered wounds and set up their own life-destroying life there, degenerating human tissue as the greenfly will destroy the rose . He began his experiments for some substance which would destroy this lower form of life, or build some barrier between it and the open wound.
He found what he wanted in a powerful disinfectant , a by-product of coal-tar, which he learned that the authorities at Carlisle were using on their sewage . I t was called carbolic .Lister introduced it into the hospital wards, into the operating room, into his surgical bandages. He dipped his instruments in it, and his swabs were rinsed in it. He even sprayed the air around with a fine mist of carbolic while he performed his operations. Joesph Lister had introduced antiseptic surgery.
It is fascinating that away in his maternity hospital in Vienna, Dr. Semmelweis had reached the same conclusion. There with greater violence even than in Britain, the thing flared into an unreasoned persecution of the pioneer by the old traditional men. Semmelweis pulished his idea of antiseptics; he was persecuted reviled, laughed at, and dismissed from his post for advocating this new method . He was driven temporarily insane; but recovering, continued his experiments in private. In one of them he contracted the blood-poisoning he was seeking to eliminate and died: a martyr to truth, prophet of progress who gave his life in great cause.
Over in France the chemist, Louis Pasteur, had just published his studies of the cause of fermentation in wines. He demonstrated that the dust of the air contained minute organisms which increased and multiplied themselves in a kind of fungus when they came into contact with the right conditions. He conducted the most careful experiments, and demonstrated that fermentation which took place in the dust - laden air of Paris did not do so in the pure glacial air on the high Alps.
When Lister read of these experiments he saw that in them, as he had long suspected, lay the anal clue to his own problem. It was not until years afterwards that he heard of Semmelweis, but already an opposition similar to that which broke the Hungarian was growing here. Simpson himself, who as the pioneer of anaesthetics had suffered a similar persecution for his own innovations, led the attack; and soon the old brigade of the medical men were. bringing all their weapons of ridicule and wild accusation to bear on the ‘Spray and Gauze ' school, as they called Lister's methods. One of the ugliest fights of Lister's career was with the Glasgow Infirmary where he had started his practice of antiseptic surgery, for they bitterly resented an attack upon the position of their buildings, which happened to be built a few feet above a cholera pit where hundreds of bodies were still decaying!-
But Lister worked on .For nine months there were no cases of the dreaded ‘ Hospitalism’ in the wards under his control. Terrible fractures and gaping wounds, which inevitably would have become septic under the old treatment, healed themselves when treated by his antiseptics and given their barrier of carbolic against the infected air. Operation performed by his sterilized instruments and cleaned with his sterilized swabs left cuts which naturally healed, when under the old system they would have broken down into gangrene or some other of the dread hospital diseases. Children lost one part of its terrors, for the horror of septic conditions starting up after the child was born became almost eliminated. It was the fight of a new idea against the old, and gradually the new won out.
On the Continent, in Copenhagen and Leipzig, in Munich, and under the great doctor Volkmann at Halle, the idea of antiseptics expanded to that even greater one of creating operating theatres and operating conditions which give no place at all for microbes. The antiseptics of Lister evolved into the aseptics of modern surgery. Steam-serilized overalls, caps, masks and rubber gloves on doctors and nurses; perfectly sterilized instruments, operating tables, and theatres, took the place of the old germ-infected operating rooms, doctors in garments blood-stained from a hundred operatings , instruments which carried bacteria from one patient’s festering wound to the next, and sponges which had been perfunctiorily rinsed out in a little warm water. In the wards too, if absolute scientific aseptic conditions were impossible, antiseptic ones were insisted upon.
Microbes, germs: these enemies of man- kind had at last been discovered. By the quiet persistence of the truth-seekers, working upstream against the flow of ancient prejudice, mankind has entered into new realms of health, and the borderlines of death have been pressed farther back.
-----摘自《英语精读文选》安徽科技出版社
