ABSTRACT
Pierre Bretonneau’s recognition of diphtheria as a specific disease distinct from other inflammations of the throat was a valuable contribution to medicine. The proposition that germs existed in the air more or less in proportion to the dust that it might be expected or observed to contain was, as far as possible, proven. In 1847 one of Ignaz Semmelweiss’s colleagues died of septicaemia resulting from a cut to his hand whilst making a post-mortem examination. Semmelweiss recognised to his astonishment that the disease that had killed his colleague was identical with puerperal fever. Serious illness in compound fractures was due to decomposition of the blood and other organic substances, of which the ‘essential cause’ had been shown by Pasteur to be in the activity of ‘germs of various low forms of life’ existing in the atmosphere. Joseph Lister devoted half a lifetime to devising and improving the means to make the germ theory of disease serviceable in surgery.
