Surgery and Society; A Tribute to Listerism (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 Excerpt: ...or to others under ordinary conditions, are capable of causing disaster in a wound. Thus everyone who enters a surgical theatre is a source of possible danger to present or future patients unless he takes special precautions, and the modern surgeon insists, most rightly, on those precautions being taken. The casual boot must no more enter the temple of this sane and scientific cult than the mosque of the Mohammedans. Wellington boots, capable of free external disinfection, and never permitted to leave the theatre, must be donned by the surgeon or the visitor: not that we can demonstrate such precautions to be necessary, but because it is evidently our duty to take them until they have been demonstrated to be unnecessary. This comparatively trivial point may be placed in the forefront of our statement because of its suggestive parallel to the religious practices of the past. A surgical theatre is a sacred place, dedicated to the cause of Life, clean in no ordinary sense, and not to be profaned. The visitor should enter it with a hushed sense of responsibility and of privilege, if not of actual worship, or he is impenetrable to the spirit of the place. Let us consider another point, which is of much greater importance. In the beginning, as we may recall, Lister employed a carbolic spray, designed to kill the microbes in the air surrounding the operation wound. That spray was an annoyance to the surgeon, and its contents injurious to the tissues of the patient, and better results have been obtained without it. But this is not to say that Lister's aim is not recognised nor sought to be realised, by far more efficient and aseptic means, in our own day. For in the first place, all the air which enters a modern theatre of the best type is first filtered by passage...