Such results as the germ theory has now led to in the treatment of diphtheria it had already accomplished in the field of surgery as a consequence of that strict asepticism which, originating with Joseph Lister (now Lord Lister), and rapidly carried by him to a condition verging on technical completeness, was soon taken up by surgeons all over the world and brought wellnigh to perfection, so that the mortality of wounds of all sorts has been tremendously reduced, and many surgical operations are now practised frequently—­indeed, whenever the occasion for them arises—­that before the days of Listerism would have been looked upon as almost tantamount to the patient’s death-warrant.  More particularly is this the case as to operations which involve opening into the abdomen, the chest, or the cranium.  So little risk now attaches to such operations, properly performed, that the opening of the abdominal cavity for the mere purpose of ascertaining the condition of its contents—­“exploratory laparotomy,” as it is called—­is a matter of constant occurrence.  Curiously enough, in some way not yet satisfactorily explained, that procedure in itself, without anything further being done, has in many instances resulted in decided amelioration of a morbid condition, if not in its cure.  A striking example of this is seen in the benefit that often results in cases of one form of “consumption of the bowels,” namely, tuberculous disease of the membrane that lines the abdominal wall and invests the abdominal organs.  This is not the only operation that does good mysteriously; that of cutting out a bit of the iris in a form of deep-seated eye disease, glaucoma, that tends toward complete blindness, is hardly more explicable; neither is an incision of the capsule of the kidney for certain forms of Bright’s disease, each of which stays the progress of the trouble in a goodly proportion of instances.

Another of the great divisions of the healing art, that of midwifery, has been enhanced quite as much as general surgery by the employment of Listerism.  The process of childbirth, although a perfectly natural one, almost necessarily carries with it a certain amount of laceration, and, through the wound surfaces thus produced, absorption of poisonous material was formerly so frequent that puerperal fever figured prominently in mortality reports.  It was Oliver Wendell Holmes—­a graduate in medicine and a professor in the Harvard Medical School, though we are accustomed to think of him only as a delightful writer—­who first declared that puerperal fever was the product of infection from without the body, and Semmelweis demonstrated the truth of the proposition.  Holmes was a teacher of physiology, and his study of that branch of medical science was in itself enough to convince him of the doctrine which he inculcated.