ABSTRACT
Before our generation disappears, to be replaced tomorrow by a generation which has not seen, it would be useful to outline the history of surgical practice in France, before, during and after the first twothirds of the nineteenth century. This practice was such that never since written history began, in the Greek world, in ancient Rome or in the darkest Middle Ages, have there been operations so murderous: a serious bloody operation was a death warrant; with our services, only a madman would have attempted even a simple remedy for hernia, and, in the hands of our most eminent masters, an amputation cost the life of 95 per cent of patients; the extraction of a cyst or of an ingrown nail resulted in a disaster and the old saying ‘a hole in the skin, an open door to all ills’ was pure truth. Erysipelas, hospital putrefaction, purulent infection, tetanus, gas gangrene, all the septicaemias attacked the wound, so much so, that terrified by these massacres, the best surgeons put down their lancets. We can say without it being a paradox that general mortality would have decreased by several units if the ‘benevolent dictator’ had got rid of all the surgeons. One doctrine was to save everything. . . . In order to inaugurate the sovereign method the powerful armour of an undisputed pathogenesis was needed. . . . It will be Pasteur’s eternal glory that he ‘objectified’ the hereto invisible enemy and created procedures to combat it. All efforts, all research by practitioners was co-ordinated; antisepsis came from nowhere, and from this Lister’s triumphant surgery finally emerged.
