ABSTRACT
In 1864 Sir Spencer Wells in an address to the British Medical Association quoted with favour the statement made in the French Academy of Medicine that the mortality from erysipelas and allied affections associated with overcrowding increased when surgical wards were over medical wards. In the same address Wells quoted Pasteur's recent experiments on the filtration of germs from air, and drew deductions as to the importance of pure air in hospital wards, but it was left for Lister to search diligently for methods of protecting each individual wound from aerial contamination. Anaesthesia as a necessary link in the greatest triumph of preventive and curative medicine deserves more than a passing reference. At once Lister darted straight to the fundamental conclusion in preventive medicine as applied to surgery that external germs must be prevented from getting into wounds and if possible must be destroyed outside the wound.
