some purists muffle up the mouth and lower part of
the face lightly in a similar comforter.

You would think that by this time the hands were clean enough to go
anywhere with safety, but no risks are going to be taken. A pair of
rubber or cotton gloves, the former taken right out of a strong
antiseptic solution, the latter out of the sterilizing oven, are pulled
carefully on by the nurse. Holding his sacred hands spread out rigidly
before him, like the front paws of a kangaroo, the surgeon carefully
edges his way into the operating-room, waiting for any doors that he may
have to pass through to be opened by the nurse, or awkwardly pushing
them with his elbow. In that attitude of benediction, the hands are
maintained until the operation is ready to begin.

Then comes the patient! If his condition will in any wise permit, he has
been given a boiling hot bath and scrub the night before, and put to bed
in a sterilized nightgown between sterilized sheets. The region which is
to be operated upon has, at the same time, been scrubbed and rubbed and
flushed with hot water, germicides, alcohol, soap,--in fact, has gone
through the same sacred ceremonial of cleansing through which the
surgeons' hands have passed; and a large, closely fitting antiseptic
dressing, covering the whole field, has been applied and tightly bound.
He is brought into a waiting-room and put under ether by an anaesthetist,
through a sterilized mask; he is then wheeled into the operating-room,
the dressing is removed, a thorough double scrub is again given, for
"good measure," to the whole area in which the wound is to be made. A
big sheet is thrown over the lower part of his body, another over the
upper part, a third, with an oval opening in the centre of it, thrown
over the region to be operated upon. The instrument nurse takes a boiled
knife out of a sterilized dish of distilled water, hands it to the
surgeon, who takes it in his gloved hand, and the operation begins.

Now, if you can think of any possible chink through which a wandering
streptococcus can, by any possibility, sneak into that wound, please
suggest it, and it shall be closed immediately!

The intruders against whom all these preparations are made are two in
number: _Streptococcus pyogenes_ and _Staphylococcus pyogenes_--cousins,
as you see, by their names. Their last (not family) name really means
something, and is not half so alarming as it sounds, as it is Greek for
"pus-making." Their