LIST (O.E. liste, a Teutonic word, cf. Dut. lijst, Ger. Leiste, adapted in Ital. lista and Fr. liste), properly a border or edging. The word was thus formerly used of a geographical boundary or frontier and of the lobe of the ear. In current usage “list” is the term applied to the “selvage” of a piece of cloth, the edging, i.e. of a web left in an unfinished state or of different material from the rest of the fabric, to be torn or cut off when it is made up, or used for forming a seam. A similar edging prevents unravelling. The material, cut off and collected, is known as “list,” and is used as a soft cheap material for making slippers, padding cushions, &c. Until the employment of rubber, list was used to stuff the cushions of billiard tables. The same word probably appears, in a plural form “lists,” applied to the barriers or palisades enclosing a space of ground set apart for tilting (see [Tournament]). It is thus used of any place of contest, and the phrase “to enter the lists” is frequently used in the sense of “to challenge.” The word in this application was taken directly from the O. Fr. lisse, modern lice, in Med. Lat. liciae. This word is usually taken to be a Romanic adaptation of the Teutonic word. In medieval fortifications the lices were the palisades forming an outwork in front of the main walls of a castle or other fortified place, and the word was also used of the space enclosed between the palisades and the enceinte; this was used for exercising troops, &c. From a transference of “list,” meaning edge or border, to a “strip” of paper, parchment, &c., containing a “list” of names, numbers, &c., comes the use of the word for an enumeration of a series of names of persons or things arranged in order for some specific purpose. It is the most general word for such an enumeration, other words, such as “register,” “schedule,” “inventory,” “catalogue,” having usually some particular connotation. The chief early use of list in this meaning was of the roll containing the names of soldiers; hence to “list a soldier” meant to enter a recruit’s name for service, in modern usage “to enlist” him. There are numerous particular applications of “list,” as in “civil list” (q.v.), “active or retired list” in the navy or army. The term “free list” is used of an enumeration of such commodities as may at a particular time be exempt from the revenue laws imposing an import duty.
The verb “to list,” most commonly found in the imperative, meaning “hark!” is another form of “listen,” and is to be referred, as to its ultimate origin, to an Indo-European root klu-, seen in Gr. κλύειν, to hear, κλέος, glory, renown, and in the English “loud.” The same root is seen in Welsh clûst and Irish clûas, ear. Another word “list,” meaning pleasure, delight, or, as a verb, meaning “to please, choose,” is chiefly found in such phrases as “the wind bloweth where it listeth.” This is from the O.E. lystan, cf. Dut. lusten, Ger. lüsten, to take pleasure in, and is also found in the English doublet “lust,” now always used in the sense of an evil or more particularly sexual desire. It is probably an application of this word, in the sense of “inclination,” that has given rise to the nautical term “list,” for the turning over of a ship on to its side.
LISTA Y ARAGON, ALBERTO (1775-1848), Spanish poet and educationalist, was born at Seville on the 15th of October 1775. He began teaching at the age of fifteen, and when little over twenty was made professor of elocution and poetry at Seville university. In 1813 he was exiled, on political grounds, but pardoned in 1817. He then returned to Spain and, after teaching for three years at Bilbao, started a critical review at Madrid. Shortly afterwards he founded the celebrated college of San Mateo in that city. The liberal character of the San Mateo educational system was not favoured by the government, and in 1823 the college was closed. Lista after some time spent in Bayonne, Paris and London was recalled to Spain in 1833 to edit the official Madrid Gazette. He was one of the founders of the Ateneo, the free university of Madrid, and up till 1840 was director of a college at Cadiz. All the leading spirits of the young generation of Spaniards, statesmen, writers, soldiers and diplomatists came under his influence. He died at Seville on the 5th of October 1848.
LISTER, JOSEPH LISTER, 1st Baron (1827- ), English surgeon, was born at Upton, in Essex, on the 5th of April 1827. His father, Joseph Jackson Lister, F.R.S., was eminent in science, especially in optical science, his chief claim to remembrance being that by certain improvements in lenses he raised the compound microscope from the position of a scientific toy, “distorting as much as it magnified,” to its present place as a powerful engine of research. Other members of Lord Lister’s family were eminent in natural science. In his boyhood Joseph Lister was educated at Quaker schools; first at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and afterwards at Tottenham, near London. In 1844 he entered University College, London, as a student in arts, and took his B.A. degree at the University of London in 1847. He continued at University College as a medical student, and became M.B. and F.R.C.S. in 1852. The keen young student was not long in bringing his faculties to bear upon pathology and the practice of medicine. While house-surgeon at University College Hospital, he had charge of certain cases during an outbreak of hospital gangrene, and carefully observed the phenomena of the disease and the effects of treatment upon it. He was thus early led to suspect the parasitic nature of the disorder, and searched with the microscope the material of the spreading sore, in the hope of discovering in it some invading fungus; he soon convinced himself of the cardinal truth that its causes were purely local. He also minutely investigated cases of pyaemia, another terrible scourge of hospitals at that time, and made camera lucida sketches of the appearances revealed by the microscope.
To realize Lister’s work it is necessary to remember the condition of surgical practice at that date. About the middle of the 19th century the introduction of anaesthetics had relieved the patient of much of the horror of the knife, and the surgeon of the duty of speed in his work. The agony of the sufferer had naturally and rightly compelled the public to demand rapid if not slap-dash surgery, and the surgeon to pride himself on it. Within decent limits of precision, the quickest craftsman was the best. With anaesthetics this state of things at any rate was changed. The pain of the operation itself no longer counted, and the surgeon was enabled not only to be as cautious and sedulous as dexterous, but also to venture upon long, profound and intricate operations which before had been out of the question. Yet unhappily this new enfranchisement seemed to be but an ironical liberty of Nature, who with the other hand took away what she had given. Direct healing of surgical wounds (“by first intention”), far from being the rule, was a piece of luck too rare to enter into the calculations of the operator; while of the graver surgical undertakings, however successful mechanically, the mortality by sepsis was ghastly. Suppuration, phagedaena and septic poisonings of the system carried away even the most promising patients and followed even trifling operations. Often, too, these diseases rose to the height of epidemic pestilences, so that patients, however extreme their need, dreaded the very name of hospital, and the most skilful surgeons distrusted their own craft. New hospitals or new wards were built, yet after a very short time the new became as pestiferous as the old; and even scrupulous care in ventilation and housemaids’ cleanliness failed to prevent the devastation. Surgery had enlarged its freedom, but only to find the weight of its new responsibilities more than it could bear.
When Lister was appointed to the chair of surgery in Glasgow the infirmary of that city was a hotbed of septic disease; so much so that his hospital visits evidently distressed him greatly. Windows were widely opened, piles of clean towels were supplied, but still the pestilence stalked through the wards. The building stands to-day as it stood then, with no substantial alteration; but by the genius of Lister its surgical wards are now as free from septic accidents as the most modern hospital in the land. James Simpson, early in the ’sixties, pathetically denounced the awful mortality of operations in hospitals, and indeed uttered desperate protests against the hospital system itself; yet, not long afterwards, Lister came to prove that it was not in the hospital that the causes of that mortality lay hidden, but in the operator himself, his tools and his assistants. Happily this beneficent discovery was made in time to preserve the inestimable boon of the hospital system from the counsels of despair. When Lister took up the task speculation was on the wrong tack; the oxygen of the air was then supposed to be the chief cause of the dissolution of the tissues, and to prevent access of air was impossible. For instance, a simple fracture, as of a bone of the leg, would do perfectly well, while in the very next bed a compound fracture—one, that is, where the skin is lacerated, and access to the seat of injury opened out—would go disastrously wrong. If the limb were amputated, a large proportion of such cases of amputation succumbed to septic poisoning.
On graduation as bachelor of medicine, Lister went to Edinburgh, where he soon afterwards became house-surgeon to Mr Syme; and he was much impressed by the skill and judgment of this great surgeon, and also by the superiority of his method of dressing recent wounds with dry lint, as compared with the “water dressing” in use at University College. Yet under these more favourable conditions the amelioration was only one of degree; in most wounds indeed “union by first intention” was rendered impossible by the presence of the silk ligatures employed for arresting bleeding, for these could come away only by a process of suppuration. On the expiry of his house-surgeoncy in Edinburgh, Lister started in that city an extra-academical course of lectures on surgery; and in preparation for these he entered on a series of investigations into inflammation and allied subjects. These researches, which were detailed fully in three papers in Phil. Trans. (1859), and in his Croonian lecture to the Royal Society in 1863, testified to an earnestness of purpose, a persevering accuracy of observation and experiment and an insight of scientific conception which show that if Lister had never developed the aseptic method of surgery, he would have taken a very high place in pathology. In his speech in Paris at the Thirteenth International Congress of Medicine in 1900, Lord Lister said that he had done no more than seize upon Pasteur’s discoveries and apply them to surgery. But though Lister saw the vast importance of the discoveries of Pasteur, he saw it because he was watching on the heights; and he was watching there alone. From Pasteur Lister derived no doubt two fruitful ideas: first, that decomposition in organic substances is due to living “germs”; and, secondly, that these lowly and minute forms of vegetable life spring always, like higher organisms, from parents like themselves, and cannot arise de novo in the animal body. After his appointment to the Glasgow chair in 1860, Lister had continued his researches on inflammation; and he had long been led to suspect that decomposition of the blood in the wound was the main cause of suppuration. The two great theories established by Pasteur seemed to Lister to open out the possibility of what had before appeared hopeless—namely, the prevention of putrefaction in the wound, and consequently the forestalling of suppuration. To exclude the oxygen of the air from wounds was impossible, but it might be practicable to protect them from microbes.