From a Photograph] [by Elliott & Fry.
LORD LISTER, P.R.S.
Born 1827. Discovered the antiseptic method in surgery. Created a Baronet in 1883, and a Baron in 1897.
Although it is the name of a Frenchman, the late M. Pasteur, which is most conspicuously associated with recent progress in pathology, it was Sir Joseph (now Lord) Lister who was led by Pasteur’s researches into the theory of fermentation to discover the antiseptic system of surgery. He employed carbolic acid, previously known as little more than a laboratory product, in destroying microbes which had found access to a wound, and thereby first made surgery scientific. But Lister did more than that; the antiseptic treatment was superseded in turn by the aseptic, in which, by sterilising everything that might come in contact with wounds, access was refused altogether to microbes, and henceforward operations surpassing the most ambitious dreams of the old school of surgery were rendered possible. From the work of Pasteur and Lister has arisen the science of bacteriology, which, in the hands of Professor Koch, of Berlin, and others, is being developed into the systematic “cultivation” of the germs of specific diseases.
From a Photograph] [by W. & D. Downey.
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, 1897.
The authorized Diamond Jubilee Portrait.
Mr. Disraeli was once greatly laughed at for announcing that the policy of his Administration was Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas. Since then the two great political parties have vied with each other in framing legislation for the sanitation of cities and all human dwellings. |Sanitary Legislation.| It may be difficult to decide which has had most hand in the good result already shown in the mortality returns, legislators or men of science; at all events, they are worthy rivals. The annual death-rate in England during the first ten years of the present reign was 22·4 per 1,000; it was a shade higher in the decade from 1861–70, standing at 22·5 per 1,000. Then came the age of sanitation and the dawn of bacteriology; the death-rate sank in 1871–80 to 21·4 per 1,000, and in 1881–90 to 19·1 per 1,000.