and can live only within the
shelter of our own bodies, where it is warm and moist and comfortable.
This is one great (in the expressive vernacular) "cinch" that we have on
the vast majority of disease-germs, whether medical or surgical, that
they do not flourish and breed outside of the body, or of houses closed
and warm; and this grip can be improved, with skill and determination,
into a veritable strangle-hold on most of them. In the language of
biology, most of them have become "adapted to their environment" so
closely that they can scarcely flourish and breed anywhere outside of
the warm, moist, fertile soil of a living body, and many of them cannot
even live long at temperatures more than ten degrees above or fifteen
degrees below that of the body. At all events, so poorly are these
pus-germs able to preserve their vigor and power of attack, not merely
outside of the human body, but outside of some wound or sore spot, that
it is practically certain that eight-tenths of all cases of
wound-infection or blood-poisoning come directly from some previous
festering wound, sore, ulcer, scab, boil, or pimple, in or on some other
human being or animal. Practically whenever we get pus in a wound in a
hospital, we insist upon finding the precise previous case of pus from
which that originated, and seldom is our search unsuccessful. If we kept
not only our wounds surgically clean, but our gums, noses, throats,
skins, and fingernails, and burned and sterilized everything that came
in contact with a sore, pustule, or scab, we should wipe out nine-tenths
of our cases of wound-infection and suppuration; in fact, practically
all of them, except such small percentage as may come from contact with
infections in animals. This is the reason why, up to half a century ago,
by a strange paradox hospitals were among the most dangerous places to
perform operations in, on account of the abundance of wounds or sores
always present for the pus-germs to breed in, and the fact that out of
fifty or more wound-cases, there was practically certain to be one or
two infected ones to poison the whole lot.

Surgeons, ignorant of antisepsis, and careless nurses, spread the
infection along, until in some instances it reached a virulence which
burst into the dreaded "hospital gangrene." This dread disease was the
scourge of all hospitals, especially military ones, all over the
civilized world, as recently as our War of Secession. In some wards of
our mili