lied, but it made matters worse. The inflammation increased
alarmingly, until finally I had to be carried on men's shoulders down
the mountain and transported to Geneva, where, thanks to the kindness
of friends, I was immediately placed in the best medical hands. On
the morning after my arrival in Geneva, Dr. Gautier discovered an
abscess in my instep, at a distance of five inches from the wound. The
two were connected by a channel, or sinus, as it is technically
called, through which he was able to empty the abscess, without the
application of the lance.

By what agency was that channel formed--what was it that thus tore
asunder the sound tissue of my instep, and kept me for six weeks a
prisoner in bed? In the very room where the water dressing had been
removed from my wound and the goldbeater's-skin applied to it, I
opened this year a number of tubes, containing perfectly clear and
sweet infusions of fish, flesh, and vegetable. These hermetically
sealed infusions had been exposed for weeks, both to the sun of the
Alps and to the warmth of a kitchen, without showing the slightest
turbidity or sign of life. But two days after they were opened the
greater number of them swarmed with the bacteria of putrefaction, the
germs of which had been contracted from the dust-laden air of the
room. And had the matter from my abscess been examined, my memory of
its appearance leads me to infer that it would have been found equally
swarming with these bacteria--that it was their germs which got into
my incautiously opened wound, and that they were the subtile workers
that burrowed down my shin, dug the abscess in my instep, and produced
effects which might easily have proved fatal.

This apparent digression brings us face to face with the labours of a
man who combines the penetration of the true theorist with the skill
and conscientiousness of the true experimenter, and whose practice is
one continued demonstration of the theory that the putrefaction of
wounds is to be averted by the destruction of the germs of bacteria.
Not only from his own reports of his cases, but from the reports of
eminent men who have visited his hospital, and from the opinions
expressed to me by continental surgeons, do I gather that one of the
greatest steps ever made in the art of surgery was the introduction of
the antiseptic system of treatment, introduced by Professor Lister.

The interest of this subject does not slacken as we proceed. We began