ABSTRACT
Joseph Lister described the principles of antiseptic surgery in a series of papers in the Lancet which appeared between March and July 1867 and which were entitled on a new method of treating Compound Fractures and Abscesses. Lister made a great discovery; or, it might be more accurate to say, he utilised in an entirely novel way a great discovery in bacteriology made by another person. Although a long way from antisepsis, this was, at least, a brilliant intuition; and, along with the accepted knowledge about puerperal fever, it lent weight to James Young Simpson’s campaign for hospital reform. By 1880 Tait was perhaps one of the ten or twelve most famous and respected surgeons in Britain, and his opposition to antisepsis had hardened. The discoveries weakened the case for what many regarded as Lister’s excessive antiseptic precautions but put the principle of antisepsis on a sounder footing.
