ABSTRACT
The general adoption of Listerism revolutionised the professional and public estimation of the value of hospital treatment; and this change, which was occurring while I was a medical student, deserves more than a passing note. For long, hospitals had been regarded as death-traps, especially for surgical and obstetric patients, and experience oft-times confirmed this view. There were dangers in hospital practice exceeding those of private practice, and sometimes more than counterbalancing the advantage of the greater skill of the hospital surgeons. Early in the eighteenth century Pringle had said that the air of military hospitals killed more than the sword; and Sir James Paget, in an address to the British Medical Association in 1862, referred to the "tolerated barbarisms of practice," only justified by the belief that the risk of "a cutting operation is so great that there is nothing too bad to be substituted for it."
