s of systems,
on which the learned disagree, it is absurd for laymen to enter; nor is
it necessary to make such comparisons in order to appreciate the example
of Lister's life. The new school believe that they have gained by the
abandonment of carbolic and other antiseptics which may irritate a wound
and by trusting to the agency of heat for killing all germs. But Lister
himself took enormous pains to keep his antiseptic as remote as possible
from the tissues to whose vitality he trusted, and went half-way to meet
the aseptic doctrine. If he retained a belief in the need for carbolic
and distrusted the elaborate ritual of the modern hospital, with its
boiling of everybody and everything connected with an operation, it was
not either from blindness or from pettiness of mind. As in the case of
abandoning the spray, it was his love of simplicity which influenced
him. If the detailed precautions of the complete aseptic system are
found practicable and beneficial in a hospital, they are difficult to
realize for a country surgeon who has to work in a humbler way, and
Lister wished his procedure to be within reach of every practitioner who
needed it.

One more point must be considered before pronouncing Listerism to be
superseded. In time of war there are occasions when necessity dictates
the treatment to be followed. Wounded men, picked up on the field of
battle some hours after they were hit, are not fit subjects for a method
that needs a clear field of operation. It is then too late for aseptic
precautions, as the wound may already be teeming with bacteria. Only the
prompt use of carbolic can stay the ravages of putrefaction; and
Lister's method, so often disparaged, must have saved the lives of
thousands during the late War.

In any case there is much common ground between the two schools: each
can learn from the other, and those professors of asepticism who have
acknowledged their debt to Lister have been wiser than those who have
made contention their aim. This was never the spirit in which he
approached scientific problems.

An earlier controversy, in which his name was involved, was that which
raged round the practice of vivisection. Here Lister had practically the
whole of his profession behind him when he boldly supported the claims
of science to have benefited humanity by the experiments conducted on
animals and to have done so with a minimum of suffering to the latter.
And it was well that science had a champion